Novel Behavior Of Water

Graduate students Limei Xu and Zhenyu Yan, working with Professor Gene Stanley and collaborators including past BU student Francis Starr, have found a novel behavior of water where the Stokes-Einstein equation describing transport in liquids is replaced by a fractional power law with an exponent of -3/5 rather than -1. This is interpreted as arising from the lack of homogeneity of the liquid due to nanoscale size fluctuations of low-density local structure. This work has appeared in Nature Physics.

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