C3 Seminar Series: Shuai Wei

Abstract: I will introduce some basic concepts of glass science and viscous liquids. In particular, I will use water as an example system to illustrate how a liquid can be supercooled and transformed into a non-equilibrium glassy state. Supercooled water exhibits some of the most intriguing behaviours in thermodynamic response functions, with implications that extend to a wide range of viscous liquids. These properties are not unique to water but may also arise in other systems, including technologically relevant phase-change materials. I will highlight the phenomenological analogies between water and such alloys, and demonstrate how techniques such as neutron scattering and ultrafast X-ray scattering can be used to probe the dynamics and structure of liquids and explore their connections to liquid and glass properties.