Structure of solid water clusters formed in a free jet expansion

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Abstract
Clusters are produced in a free jet expansion of water vapor. Keeping constant the nozzle diameter (d=0.4 mm) and temperature (T=430 K), an increase in inlet vapor pressure from 1 to 5 bar produces an increase in mean cluster size from several tens to several thousands of molecules per cluster. An electron diffraction analysis provides information about the cluster structure and dynamics. A direct observation of diffraction patterns shows that the largest clusters exhibit mainly a crystalline structure, namely, diamond cubic which is the metastable phase of bulk solid water, whereas the smallest ones are amorphous. In order to elucidate the local order in the latter, a comparison is made between the experimental curves and the diffraction functions calculated for various noncrystalline models. The best agreement is obtained with a model which presents distorted rings of three to six H2O molecules, constructed by cooling a liquid water droplet through a molecular dynamics calculation. In particular, this means that the regular dodecahedral structure often referred to in mass spectroscopy is not a realistic model for neutral clusters.