Model for single-particle dynamics in supercooled water.

Abstract

We analyze a set of 10 M-step molecular dynamics (MD) data of low-temperature SPC/E model water with a phenomenological analytical model. The motivation is twofold: to extract various k-dependent physical parameters associated with the single-particle or the self-intermediate scattering functions (SISFs) of water at a deeply supercooled temperature and to apply this analytical model to analyses of new high resolution quasielastic neutron scattering data presented elsewhere. The SISF of the center of mass computed from the MD data show clearly time-separated two-step relaxations with a well defined plateau in between. We model the short time relaxation of the test particle as a particle trapped in a harmonical potential well with the vibrational frequency distribution function having a two-peak structure known from previous inelastic neutron scattering experiments. For the long time part of the relaxation, we take the alpha relaxation suggested by mode-coupling theory. The model fits the low-temperature SISF over the entire time range from 1 fs to 10 ns, allowing us to extract peak positions of the vibrational density of states, the structural relaxation rate 1/tau of the cage (the potential well) and the stretch exponent beta. The structural relaxation rate has a power law dependence on the magnitude of the wave vector transfer k and the stretch exponent varies from 0.55 at large k to unity at small k.