Chain Breakage in the Supercooled Liquid - Liquid Transition and Re-entry of the λ-transition in Sulfur

• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-22775-y
• Publication Date: 2018-03-08T16:27:11Z
• Authors: Linji Zhang; Yang Ren; Xiuru Liu; Fei Han; Kenneth Evans-Lut...; Hongyan Wang; Yali He; Junlong Wang; Yong Zhao; Wenge Yang
• Keywords: Supercooling; Breakage

Amorphous sulfur was prepared by rapid compression of liquid at temperatures above the λ-transition for to preserve high-temperature structure. We conducted synchrotron high-energy X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy diagnose structural evolution amorphous from room temperature post-λ-transition temperature. Discontinuous changes first second peaks in atomic pair-distribution-function, g(r), were observed during transition sulfur. The average first-neighbor coordination numbers showed an abrupt drop 1.92 1.81. chain length clearly shows that accompanied polymeric chains breaking. Furthermore, a re-entry structure involved heating process. sulfur, which inherits its parent melts, transformed pre-λ-transition around 391 K. Upon further heating, through well-known This discovery offers new perspective on sulfur's inheritance has implications understanding structure, properties liquids.