Supercooled Water Confined in a Silica Xerogel: Temperature and Pressure Dependence of Boson Peak and of Mean Square Displacements

A silica xerogel can be obtained from an alcoxide precursor (TMOS, tetramethylortosilcate) via the sol-gel method: TMOS hydrolysis and subsequent polycondensation yields a solid, disordered, porous SiO2 matrix (average pore dimensions ~20Å). Inside the pores water is trapped and the hydration level h=gr[H2O]/gr[SiO2] can be easily controlled. The presence and temperature dependence of the boson peak (BP) in xerogel confined supercooled water was studied with inelastic neutron scattering (spectrometer IN6 at ILL, Grenoble) in xerogel samples having h=0.4 and h=0.2. After careful subtraction of the contributions arising from the matrix and from quasi-elastic scattering, the BP contribution wa…