Fast vs slow water--explaining the fragile-to-strong transition

A Japanese research team led by The University of Tokyo investigated the fragile-to-strong transition of water. Unlike most liquids, when water is cooled, the rate of increase of its viscosity reaches a maximum at a certain low temperature. The team showed that modeling water as a temperature-dependent mixture of two states--disordered fast water and locally ordered slow water--explained the fragile-to-strong transition and avoided the faulty predictions of earlier theories based on glassy behav...