2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Ordering and potential appearance of a phase transition in low-tenperature liquid confined within meso-pores

Research Project

Project/Area Number	25610119
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Biological physics/Chemical physics/Soft matter physics
Research Institution	Tokyo Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator	OGUNI Masaharu 東京工業大学, 理工学研究科, 教授 (50144423)
Project Period (FY)	2013-04-01 – 2014-03-31
Keywords	液体 / 相転移 / 熱容量
Research Abstract	Low-temperature thermal properties of liquid cyclohexane and benzene were studied by adiabatic calorimetry. Three features were found to be pointed out. The first is that the glass transition temperature and therefore the elementary process causing the transition reveal no big change with the pore diameter. The second is, the heat capacity curve displays a gentle peak and the peak temperature decreases with increasing the diameter, indicating that the peak in bulk liquid would appear below the glass transition temperature. This is understood as caused by the spatial restriction in the number of the permitted molecular configurations of the aggregates. The third is, in the case of cyclohexane, a phase transition appears in the pores with diameter around 2.1 nm. This implies that a special structure inherent to the liquid elementary one would be stabilized within the pores with including the inter-atomic interactions between the molecules and pore wall.