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Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition

Liquid-liquid transition (LLT) in single-component liquids is one of the most mysterious phenomena in condensed matter. So far, this problem has attracted attention mainly from the fundamental viewpoint. We report the first experimental study on an impact of surface nanostructuring on LLT by using a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Murata, Ken-ichiro, Tanaka, Hajime
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315451/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28232957
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1602209
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author Murata, Ken-ichiro
Tanaka, Hajime
author_facet Murata, Ken-ichiro
Tanaka, Hajime
author_sort Murata, Ken-ichiro
collection PubMed
description Liquid-liquid transition (LLT) in single-component liquids is one of the most mysterious phenomena in condensed matter. So far, this problem has attracted attention mainly from the fundamental viewpoint. We report the first experimental study on an impact of surface nanostructuring on LLT by using a surface treatment called rubbing, which is the key technology for the production of liquid crystal displays. We find that this rubbing treatment has a significant impact on the kinetics of LLT of an isotropic molecular liquid, triphenyl phosphite. For a liquid confined between rubbed surfaces, surface-induced barrierless formation of the liquid II phase is observed even in a metastable state, where there should be a barrier for nucleation of the liquid II phase in bulk. Thus, surface rubbing of substrates not only changes the ordering behavior but also significantly accelerates the kinetics. This spatiotemporal pattern modulation of LLT can be explained by a wedge-filling transition and the resulting drastic reduction of the nucleation barrier. However, this effect completely disappears in the unstable (spinodal) regime, indicating the absence of the activation barrier even for bulk LLT. This confirms the presence of nucleation-growth– and spinodal decomposition–type LLT, supporting the conclusion that LLT is truly a first-order transition with criticality. Our finding also opens up a new way to control the kinetics of LLT of a liquid confined in a solid cell by structuring its surface on a mesoscopic length scale, which may contribute to making LLT useful for microfluidics and other industrial applications.
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spelling pubmed-53154512017-02-23 Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition Murata, Ken-ichiro Tanaka, Hajime Sci Adv Research Articles Liquid-liquid transition (LLT) in single-component liquids is one of the most mysterious phenomena in condensed matter. So far, this problem has attracted attention mainly from the fundamental viewpoint. We report the first experimental study on an impact of surface nanostructuring on LLT by using a surface treatment called rubbing, which is the key technology for the production of liquid crystal displays. We find that this rubbing treatment has a significant impact on the kinetics of LLT of an isotropic molecular liquid, triphenyl phosphite. For a liquid confined between rubbed surfaces, surface-induced barrierless formation of the liquid II phase is observed even in a metastable state, where there should be a barrier for nucleation of the liquid II phase in bulk. Thus, surface rubbing of substrates not only changes the ordering behavior but also significantly accelerates the kinetics. This spatiotemporal pattern modulation of LLT can be explained by a wedge-filling transition and the resulting drastic reduction of the nucleation barrier. However, this effect completely disappears in the unstable (spinodal) regime, indicating the absence of the activation barrier even for bulk LLT. This confirms the presence of nucleation-growth– and spinodal decomposition–type LLT, supporting the conclusion that LLT is truly a first-order transition with criticality. Our finding also opens up a new way to control the kinetics of LLT of a liquid confined in a solid cell by structuring its surface on a mesoscopic length scale, which may contribute to making LLT useful for microfluidics and other industrial applications. American Association for the Advancement of Science 2017-02-17 /pmc/articles/PMC5315451/ /pubmed/28232957 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1602209 Text en Copyright © 2017, The Authors http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) , which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Articles
Murata, Ken-ichiro
Tanaka, Hajime
Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
title Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
title_full Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
title_fullStr Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
title_full_unstemmed Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
title_short Impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
title_sort impact of surface roughness on liquid-liquid transition
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315451/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28232957
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1602209
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