Tunable Liquid-Liquid Critical Point in an Ionic Model of Silica.

Recently, it was shown that the Woodcock-Angell-Cheeseman model for liquid silica [L. V. Woodcock, C. A. Angell, and P. Cheeseman, J. Chem. Phys. 65, 1565 (1976)] is remarkably close to having a liquid-liquid critical point (LLCP). We demonstrate that increasing the ion charge separates the global maxima of the response functions, while reducing the charge smoothly merges them into a LLCP, a phenomenon that might be experimentally observable with charged colloids. An analysis of the Si and O coordination numbers suggests that a sufficiently low Si/O coordination number ratio is needed to attain a LLCP.