Approaches to understand water anomalies

The fact is that pure water, broken down into small droplets of micrometer size, can be supercooled to 232 K. This in itself is a puzzle because water is a liquid with a fast response and therefore not expected to fail to crystallize and reach the state of minimum free energy. Nevertheless, liquid water can be supercooled by as much as 

Not only in experiments, but even eomputer simulations, find that liquid water does not crystallize easily. 

We have already discussed many of the unusual properties of water at room temperature, such as the temperature dependence of the pH of water, its hydro-phobicity and hydrophilicity with respect to foreign solutes, its role in controlling biological functions, etc. Here we shall discuss a few more such issues not discussed previously. 

Such a billiard-ball model of a simple liquid, initiated by J.D. Bernal, has dominated theoretical studies/approaches towards the liquid state of matter for half a century. Such a billiard-ball model, and its generalization to include non-spherical shapes, works not only for liquid argon and krypton, but also for many liquids such as methane, ethane, and carbon tetrachloride, to name a few. However, 

The percolating HB network model was developed by many authors, notably Gibbs et al. [2], StiUinger and Rahman [3], Stanley and Teixeira [4], Ohmine and Saito [5], and several others. In the following we shall describe some of these historical developments that led to the present-day understanding of the complex properties of water. 

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