Invitation to the ICTP Webinar Colloquium by Pablo Debenedetti on "The Phase Behavior of Supercooled Water: Recent Computational Results" - Wednesday 17 November 2021 at 16:00 hrs CET

[ICTP/director]

Dear All,

You are most cordially invited to the ICTP Webinar Colloquium by Pablo 
Debenedetti on "The Phase Behavior of Supercooled Water: Recent 
Computational Results", on Wednesday 17 November 2021 at 16:00 hrs CET

Advance registration is required at:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kXFGJGfLRXiS3kmnkshAKw
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing 
information about joining the webinar.

*Biosketch: *Pablo G. Debenedetti is the Class of 1950 Professor in 
Engineering and Applied Science, Professor of Chemical and Biological 
Engineering, and Dean for Research.  He joined the faculty of Princeton 
University in 1985. He is a member of the National Academy of 
Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National 
Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical 
Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 
the American Physical Society.

Debenedetti uses theoretical and computational tools to study the 
properties of water and aqueous systems, and their applications in areas 
ranging from the long-term preservation of biomolecules and 
pharmaceutical compounds to water desalination. His interests span the 
thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of liquids and glasses, as well 
as explorations of water and aqueous solutions, protein thermodynamics, 
nucleation, metastability, and the origin of homochirality in biological 
systems. Using theoretical and computational methods, Debenedetti and 
his students have provided key insights into the physical properties of 
cold liquid water (supercooled water), which is found in large 
quantities in high-altitude clouds. Debenedetti is the author of one 
book, Metastable Liquids, and more than 300 scientific articles. He 
received many professional honours.

*Abstract: *
Water plays a central role in the physical and chemical processes that 
sustain life as we know it. Its ubiquity and importance notwithstanding, 
there remain major open questions concerning the microscopic origin and 
thermodynamic consequences of water’s physical properties, which are 
anomalous by comparison to those of most other liquids. Water’s oddities 
become more pronounced at low temperatures, especially in the 
supercooled regime, where the liquid is metastable with respect to 
crystallization. The existence of a first-order phase transition between 
two liquid forms of water, terminating at a critical point under deeply 
supercooled conditions, has been proposed as a thermodynamically 
consistent way of interpreting experimental observations (Mishima and 
Stanley, Nature, 396, 329, 1998). I will present recent computational 
results on metastable criticality in realistic models of water 
(Debenedetti et al., Science, 369, 289, 2020), supercooled water 
thermodynamics probed with an ab-initio deep neural network model 
(Gartner et al., PNAS, 117, 26040, 2020), and the relationship between 
the long-range structure of water glasses and criticality (Gartner et 
al., Nature Communications, 12, 3398, 2021). These studies are 
consistent with the existence of a second, metastable critical point in 
water.

The talk will be followed by a question/answer session.

For info, please check the following link: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9716/

We look forward to seeing you online!

With best regards,

Office of the Director, ICTP