Thermal properties and dynamics of water cluster anions

Date:

This is a presentation about my negative results at Clustertreffen 2015. I studied low temperature phase transition of medium-sized negative water clusters (H2O)n-, n=50. Our hypothesis was that the clusters undergo glass transition. The way how to test this hypothesis was to vary a rate of cooling, i.e. the rate of relaxation of the internal structure. Precooling set-up was built but the project suffered from inability to specify and reliably reproduce conditions of cluster formation in an aggregation source. I believe that if we cannot quantify the generation conditions we do not know which initial structure the cluster has, therefore it is impossible to fix relaxation conditions. The project was abandoned for experimental difficulties.

The slides can be downloaded here.