Person:
Montero De Hijes, Pablo

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First Name
Pablo
Last Name
Montero De Hijes
Affiliation
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Faculty / Institute
Ciencias Químicas
Department
Química Física
Area
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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Anomalous Behavior in the Nucleation of Ice at Negative Pressures
    (Physical Review Letters, 2021) Bianco, Valentino; Montero De Hijes, Pablo; Cintia P. Lamas; Sanz García, Eduardo Santiago; Carlos Vega; Vega De Las Heras, Carlos
    Ice nucleation is a phenomenon that, despite the relevant implications for life, atmospheric sciences, and technological applications, is far from being completely understood, especially under extreme thermodynamic conditions. In this work we present a computational investigation of the homogeneous ice nucleation at negative pressures. By means of the seeding technique we estimate the size of the ice critical nucleus Nc for the TIP4P/Ice water model. This is done along the isotherms 230, 240, and 250 K, from positive to negative pressures until reaching the liquid-gas kinetic stability limit (where cavitation cannot be avoided). We find that Nc is nonmonotonic upon depressurization, reaching a minimum at negative pressures in the doubly metastable region of water. According to classical nucleation theory we establish the nucleation rate J and the surface tension γ, revealing a retracing behavior of both when the liquid-gas kinetic stability limit is approached. We also predict a reentrant behavior of the homogeneous nucleation line. The reentrance of these properties is related to the reentrance of the coexistence line at negative pressure, revealing new anomalies of water. The results of this work suggest the possibility of having metastable samples of liquid water for long times at negative pressure provided that heterogeneous nucleation is suppressed.
  • Item
    Interfacial Free Energy and Tolman Length of Curved Liquid-Solid Interfaces from Equilibrium Studies
    (Journal of Physical Chemitry C, 2020) Montero De Hijes, Pablo; Espinosa, Jorge R.; Bianco, Valentino; Sanz García, Eduardo Santiago; Vega De Las Heras, Carlos
    In this work, we study by means of simulations of hard spheres the equilibrium between a spherical solid cluster and the fluid. In the NVT ensemble we observe stable/metastable clusters of the solid phase in equilibrium with the fluid, representing configurations that are global/local minima of the Helmholtz free energy. Then, we run NpT simulations of the equilibrated system at the average pressure of the NVT run and observe that the clusters are critical because they grow/shrink with a probability of 1/2. Therefore, a crystal cluster equilibrated in the NVT ensemble corresponds to a Gibbs free energy máximum where the nucleus is in unstable equilibrium with the surrounding fluid, in accordance with what has been recently shown for vapor bubbles in equilibrium with the liquid. Then, within the Seeding framework, we use Classical Nucleation Theory to obtain both the interfacial free energy γ and the nucleation rate. The latter is in very good agreement with independent estimates using techniques that do not rely on Classical Nucleation Theory when the mislabeling criterion is used to identify the molecules of the solid cluster. We therefore argue that the radius obtained from the mislabeling criterion provides a good approximation for the radius of tension, R_s . We obtain an estimate of the Tolman length by extrapolating the difference between R e (the Gibbs dividing surface) and R s to infinite radius. We show that such definition of the Tolman length coincides with that obtained by fitting γ versus 1/R_s to a straight line as recently applied to hard spheres.