Microscopic identification of the order parameter governing liquid-liquid transition in a molecular liquid.

ABSTRACT: A liquid-liquid transition (LLT) in a single-component substance is an unconventional phase transition from one liquid to another. LLT has recently attracted considerable attention because of its fundamental importance in our understanding of the liquid state. To access the order parameter governing LLT from a microscopic viewpoint, here we follow the structural evolution during the LLT of an organic molecular liquid, triphenyl phosphite (TPP), by time-resolved small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering measurements. We find that locally favored clusters, whose characteristic size is a few nanometers, are spontaneously formed and their number density monotonically increases during LLT. This strongly suggests that the order parameter of LLT is the number density of locally favored structures an

SUBMITTER: Murata K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4434750 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature