High pressure induced phase transition and superdiffusion in anomalous fluid confined in flexible nanopores

Abstract

The behavior of a confined spherical symmetric anomalous fluid under high external pressure was studied with Molecular Dynamics simulations. The fluid is modeled by a core-softened potential with two characteristic length scales, which in bulk reproduces the dynamical, thermodynamical, and structural anomalous behavior observed for water and other anomalous fluids. Our findings show that this system has a superdiffusion regime for sufficient high pressure and low temperature. As well, our results indicate that this superdiffusive regime is strongly related with the fluid structural properties and the superdiffusion to diffusion transition is a first order phase transition. We show how the simulation time and statistics are important to obtain the correct dynamical behavior of the confined fluid. Our results are discussed on the basis of the two length scales.