Understanding the coherent dynamic structure factor of liquid water measured by neutron spectroscopy with polarization analysis: a Molecular Dynamics simulations study

¹ Centro de Física de Materiales (CFM) (CSIC-UPV/EHU) Materials Physics Center (MPC), San Sebastián, Spain
² Departamento de Polímeros y Materiales Avanzados: Física, Química y Tecnología, UPV/EHU, San Sebastián, Spain
³ Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), San Sebastián, Spain

^* juan.colmenero@ehu.eus

Published online: 17 November 2022

Abstract

This work is focused on atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of water carried out at 300 K. The main goal is to better understand the experimental results of the coherent dynamic structure factor S(Q,ν) of D₂O that were obtained by means of neutron scattering with polarization analysis and previously reported by us [A. Arbe et al. Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 022015 (2020)]. From the simulations, we have calculated the coherent dynamic structure factor in the time domain S(Q,t) as well as its selfand distinctcontributions. We have also calculated S(Q,t) corresponding to a H₂O sample. The main results obtained are: (i) The Q-independent relaxation process identified in S(Q,ν) in the mesoscopic range (Q⁰-mode) is the responsible of the restructuring of the hydrogen bond (HB) network at times shorter than that corresponding to the molecular diffusion; (ii) the vibrational contribution identified at high frequency in S(Q,ν) corresponds to a hydrodynamic-like mode propagating in an elastic medium (fixed HB bonding pattern); (iii) in the crossover range from mesoscopic to intermolecular scales, diffusion also progressively contributes to the decay of density fluctuations; (iv) MD-simulations suggest that it would be basically impossible to measure S(Q,ν,) of H₂O in the mesoscopic range with the current neutron scattering capabilities.