A Theory to Tackle Supercooling

Liquids are fascinating. As Feynman said in his famous lectures, watching a stream or waterfall, one has the impression that liquids are “almost alive relative to solids” [1]. Although the development of a theory for liquids trailed that for solids by several decades, modern theory can explain a rich variety of liquid behavior and properties. But a phenomenon that has proven difficult to treat theoretically is a supercooled liquid, the highly viscous state that can form when a liquid is cooled below its freezing point but doesn’t crystallize. A promising theoretical framework for tackling the supercooled state has now been proposed by Patrick Royall of the University of Bristol in the UK, Roland Roth of the University of Tübingen in Germany, and colleagues, who have developed a new method for calculating the structure of liquids on a microscopic level [2]. This approach, which assumes liquid particles congregate into multiparticle clusters, offers a way to test different supercooling theories.