Computational investigation of water glasses using machine-learning potentials.
Journal:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Published Date:
Aug 5, 2025
Abstract
The molecular origins of water's anomalous properties have long been a subject of scientific inquiry. The liquid-liquid phase transition hypothesis, which posits the existence of distinct low-density and high-density liquid states separated by a first-order phase transition terminating at a critical point, has gained increasing experimental and computational support and offers a thermodynamically consistent framework for many of water's anomalies. However, experimental challenges in avoiding crystallization near the postulated liquid-liquid critical point have focused attention to water's canonical glassy states: low-density and high-density amorphous ice. Here, we use two Deep Potential machine-learning models, trained on the Strongly Constrained and Appropriately Normed density functional and the highly accurate Many-Body Polarizable potential, to conduct an investigation of water's glassy phenomenology based on quantum mechanical calculations. Despite not being explicitly trained on amorphous ices, both models accurately capture the structure and transformation of the water glasses, including their interconversion along different thermodynamic paths. Isobaric quenching of liquid water at various pressures generates a continuum of intermediate amorphous ices and density fluctuations increase near the liquid-liquid critical pressure. The glass transition temperatures of the amorphous ices produced at different pressures exhibit two distinct branches, corresponding to low-density and high-density amorphous ice behaviors, consistent with experiment and the liquid-liquid transition hypothesis. Extrapolating transformation pressures from isothermal compressions to experimental compression rates brings our simulations into excellent agreement with data. Our findings demonstrate that machine-learning potentials trained on equilibrium phases can effectively model nonequilibrium glassy behavior and pave the way for studying long-timescale, out-of-equilibrium processes with quantum mechanical accuracy.
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