Probing Ice Nucleation in "No Man's Land" with Ultrafast X-ray Laser at LCLS
Abstract
Aside from being one of the most fascinating substances due to many anomalous physical properties in liquid phase, and many forms of amorphous and crystalline solid phases, water is one of the most important substance for life, environment, and industry. Despite tremendous effort to understand water, there is a region known as "no man's land" where water is not well understood due to rapid crystallization complicating experimental studies. Understanding phase transition of supercooled water near and within this region is important to predict cloud properties in atmosphere, as well as the phases of water in the interstellar space. To date, there are only a few experiments performed that study phase transitions near and within "no man's land", and thus our understanding is still limited. Recent development of an ultrafast, ultrabright X-ray laser at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) enables researchers to probe matter in high resolution by taking snapshots with femtosecond long x-ray pulses. Here we present our ongoing effort to understand phase transition within "no man's land" from our recent wide angle X-ray scattering experiment using a specialized setup to take advantage the ultrafast X-ray laser at LCLS.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFM.A13I0303L
- Keywords:
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- 0394 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Instruments and techniques;
- 0399 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / General or miscellaneous;
- 0738 CRYOSPHERE / Ice