Supercritical fluids behave as complex networks.

ABSTRACT: Supercritical fluids play a key role in environmental, geological, and celestial processes, and are of great importance to many scientific and engineering applications. They exhibit strong variations in thermodynamic response functions, which has been hypothesized to stem from the microstructural behavior. However, a direct connection between thermodynamic conditions and the microstructural behavior, as described by molecular clusters, remains an outstanding issue. By utilizing a first-principles-based criterion and self-similarity analysis, we identify energetically localized molecular clusters whose size distribution and connectivity exhibit self-similarity in the extended supercritical phase space. We show that the structural response of these clusters follows a complex network behavior

SUBMITTER: Simeski F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10083177 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature