Eur. Phys. J. E (2003) 12: 59-62
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjed/e2003-01-015-3

Dynamics of supercooled water in mesoporous silica matrix MCM-48-S

¹ Department of Nuclear Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
² Department of Physics and INFM, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
³ Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
⁴ NIST Center for Neutron Research, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
⁵ Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

^* e-mail: sowhsin@mit.edu

Received: 1 January 2003
Published online: 5 November 2003

Abstract

Using three different quasielastic neutron spectrometers with widely different resolutions, we have been able to study the microscopic translational and rotational dynamics of water, in a mesoporos silica matrix MCM-48-S, from T=300 K to 220 K, with a single consistent model. We formulated our fitting routine using the relaxing cage model. Thus, from the fit of the experimental data, we extracted the fraction of water bound to the surface of the pore, the characteristic relaxation times of the long-time translational and rotational decays, the stretch exponent describing the shape of the relaxation processes, and the power exponent determining the Q-dependence of the translational relaxation time. A tremendous slowing down of the rotational relaxation time, as compared to the translational one, has been observed.