Water structure and dynamics

The peculiar properties of liquid water result from its dense hydrogen-bond network, but several fundamental questions about the structure and dynamics of water remain unresolved. Water's anomalous physical properties are greatly accentuated in the supercooled regime. For example, the time scale of diffusive molecular motions appears to diverge in power-law fashion just below the homogeneous nucleation temperature. This strange behavior indicates structural heterogeneity and hints at the existence of two forms of liquid water. We use nuclear spin relaxation, quasielastic neutron scattering, molecular dynamics simulations and statistical-mechanical modeling to study the structure and dynamics of liquid water, with the current focus on the supercooled regime.