Atomistic View of Homogeneous Nucleation of Water into Polymorphic Ices
Abstract
Water is one of the most abundant substances on Earth, and ice, i.e., solid water, has more than 18 known phases. Normally ice in nature exists only as Ice Ih, Ice Ic, or a stacking disordered mixture of both. Although many theoretical efforts have been devoted to understanding the thermodynamics of different ice phases at ambient temperature and pressure, there still remains many puzzles. We simulated the reversible transitions between water and different ice phases by performing full atom molecular dynamics simulations. Using the enhanced sampling method MetaITS with the two selected X-ray diffraction peak intensities as collective variables, the ternary phase diagrams of liquid water, ice Ih, ice Ic at multiple were obtained. We also present a simple physical model which successfully explains the thermodynamic stability of ice. Our results agree with experiments and leads to a deeper understanding of the ice nucleation mechanism.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2111.12234,
title = {Atomistic View of Homogeneous Nucleation of Water into Polymorphic Ices},
author = {Maodong Li and Jun Zhang and Niu Haiyang and Yao Kun Lei and Xu Han and Lijiang Yang and Zhiqiang Ye and Yi Isaac Yang and Yi Qin Gao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.12234},
year = {2022}
}