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Shrinking of Rapidly Evaporating Water Microdroplets Reveals their Extreme Supercooling

Goy, Claudia; Potenza, Marco A. C.; Dedera, Sebastian; Tomut, Marilena; Guillerm, Emmanuel; Kalinin, Anton; Voss, Kay-Obbe; Schottelius, Alexander; Petridis, Nikolaos; Prosvetov, Alexey; Tejeda, Guzman; Fernandez, Jose M.; Trautmann, Christina; Caupin, Fre

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
2018
VL / 120 - BP / - EP /
abstract
The fast evaporative cooling of micrometer-sized water droplets in a vacuum offers the appealing possibility to investigate supercooled water-below the melting point but still a liquid-at temperatures far beyond the state of the art. However, it is challenging to obtain a reliable value of the droplet temperature under such extreme experimental conditions. Here, the observation of morphology-dependent resonances in the Raman scattering from a train of perfectly uniform water droplets allows us to measure the variation in droplet size resulting from evaporative mass losses with an absolute precision of better than 0.2%. This finding proves crucial to an unambiguous determination of the droplet temperature. In particular, we find that a fraction of water droplets with an initial diameter of 6379 +/- 12 nm remain liquid down to 230.6 +/- 0.6 K. Our results question temperature estimates reported recently for larger supercooled water droplets and provide valuable information on the hydrogen-bond network in liquid water in the hard-to-access deeply supercooled regime.

AccesS level

Green published

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