The physics of Empty Liquids: from Patchy particles to Water

Abstract

Empty liquids represent a wide class of materials whose constituents arrange in a random network through reversible bonds. Many key insights on the physical properties of empty liquids have originated almost independently from the study of colloidal patchy particles on one side, and a large body of theoretical and experimental research on water on the other side. Patchy particles represent a family of coarse-grained potentials that allows for a precise control of both the geometric and the energetic aspects of bonding, while water has arguably the most complex phase diagram of any pure substance, and a puzzling amorphous phase behavior. It was only recently that the exchange of ideas from both fields has made it possible to solve long-standing problems and shed new light on the behavior of empty liquids. Here we highlight the connections between patchy particles and water, focusing on the modelling principles that make an empty liquid behave like water, including the factors that control the appearance of thermodynamic and dynamic anomalies, the possibility of liquid-liquid phase transitions, and the crystallization of open crystalline structures.

21 pages, 10 figures, first submitted version, for final article see Reports on Progress in Physics https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/ac42d9

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Design strategies for the self-assembly of polyhedral shells
• Identification of local structures in water from supercooled to ambient conditions
• Dynamics of equilibrium linked colloidal gels
• Two-step nucleation in a binary mixture of Patchy Particles
• A neural network potential with self-trained atomic fingerprints: a test with the mW water potential