Last May, James Drewitt from the School of Earth Science here in Bristol asked me to have a look at his data on ver high pressure and temperature gallium. Used to my idealised particles in box, I thought that it would be interesting to look understand what information can reasonably emerge in this more realistic setting.
It turns out that gallium is a liquid with a number of noticeable physical characteristics: a melting point just above room temperature at ambient pressure conditions, high thermal conductivity and a strong tendency to undercooling, i.e. to remain disordered well below its melting temperature (which is even enhanced with respect to the bulk behaviour when small droplets of gallium as considered). To my surprise, it also appears that many of the tools that I have employed to study the structure of simple liquids are useful to understand how extreme pressure and temperatures affect this metallic liquid.
We have shown, for example, that as the pressure increases the liquid shows a preference to form local motifs of radically different nature in somewhat similar proportions, as opposed to what would happen in purely repulsive systems. This is interesting, as this competition between different forms of local order provides a mechanism for the enhanced stability in supercooled conditions. We also have found out that simplistic approaches to the modelling of the three dimensional structure of the liquid (such as naive Reverse Monte Carlo methods) overlook these changes in structure and are strongly biased by their initial guesses.
The reference to the full work, that combines new experimental evidence with a detailed numerical simulation analysis, is
Francesco Turci 