期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2018
卷号：115
期号：9
页码：1980-1985
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1717233115
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Water and silica are the most important materials with local tetrahedral symmetry. They have similar crystalline polymorphs and exhibit anomalous density maximum in the liquid state. However, water and silica also show very different characteristics. For instance, the density of water varies much more sharply than that of liquid silica near the maximum as temperature changes. More notably, silica is a very good glass-former, but water is an extremely poor one. The physical origins of these similarities and differences still remain elusive, due to the lack of a microscopic understanding of the structural ordering in these two important liquids. Here, by accessing microscopic structural information by computer simulations, we reveal that local translational symmetry breaking is responsible for the density anomalies. On the other hand, the difference in the degree of local orientational symmetry breaking between water and silica, which originates from the difference in their bonding nature, causes not only the difference in the sharpness of density anomalies, but also their distinct glass-forming abilities. Our work not only shows the crucial roles of local translational and orientational symmetry breaking in the physical properties of the two extremely important materials, water and silica, but also provides a unified scenario applicable for other tetrahedral liquids such as Si, Ge, C, BeF2, and GeO2.
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