A molecular beam study of the evaporation of water from a liquid jet

Abstract

A method to maintain a clean surface of a liquid in a high vacuum is described. Using a very thin and fast liquid jet it is not only possible to prevent freezing of the liquid but also to reduce the number of collisions between evaporating molecules to negligibly small values. Thus many of the standard, vacuum dependent, particle probing techniques for solid surfaces can be used for studies of rapidly vaporizing, high vapor pressure liquids. In a first molecular beam investigation we have used time-of-flight analysis to measure the velocity distribution of H2O molecules vaporizing from thin jets of pure liquid water. The experiments were carried out for liquid jet diameters between 50 and 5 µm. In this range the expanding vapor is observed to undergo the transition to the collision-free molecular flow regime. From the measured velocity distributions the local surface temperature is determined to be less than 210 K. This appears to be the lowest temperature ever reported for supercooled liquid water.