This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)
H. E. Stanley of Boston University is supported by an award from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry program to carry out research concerned with understanding static and dynamic heterogeneities in confined water. One focus of this research program is to answer the question: "what features of bulk water survive in confinement"? The PI and his students work closely with many experimental groups to help interpret experiments on confined, glassy and super-cooled water. One hypothesis that is being tested both experimentally and theoretically is the existence, for confined water, of a liquid-liquid critical point.
Understanding the properties of confined water is important to many fields including biology and geology. The results from this research are being extended to understand other materials such as metallic glasses that are now thought to share some features of liquid water. Both graduate students and undergraduates contribute to this research.
