Hypercooling Temperature of Water is about 100 K Higher than Calculated before.

Abstract

For deeply supercooled liquids the transition from a two-stage freezing process to complete solidification in just one freezing step occurs at the hypercooling temperature, a term that seems to be almost unknown in water research; to our knowledge, it has only been mentioned by Dolan et al. for high-pressure ice. The reason for the absence of this expression may be that the best estimate to be found in the literature for the hypercooling temperature of water is about -160 °C (113 K). This temperature is far below the limit of experimentally realizable degrees of supercooling near -40 °C (233 K), which marks the homogeneous nucleation temperature TH of common pure water; in fact, it is even below the glass-transition temperature (133 K). Here we show that, surprisingly, a more thorough analysis taking into account the temperature dependence of the heat capacities of water and ice as well as of the enthalpy of freezing shows that the hypercooling temperature of water is about -64 °C or 209 K, almost 100 K higher than estimated before. One of the most exciting consequences is that existing experiments are already able to reach these degrees of supercooling, and it is our prediction that a transition in the freezing behavior occurs at these temperatures.