Critical behavior of a water monolayer under hydrophobic confinement

Abstract: The properties of water can have a strong dependence on the confinement. Here, we consider a water monolayer nanoconfined between hydrophobic parallel walls under conditions that prevent its crystallization. We investigate, by simulations of a many-body coarse-grained water model, how the properties of the liquid are affected by the confinement. We show, by studying the response functions and the correlation length and by performing finite-size scaling of the appropriate order parameter, that at low temperature the monolayer undergoes a liquid-liquid phase transition ending in a critical point in the universality class of the two-dimensional (2D) Ising model. Surprisingly, by reducing the linear size L of the walls, keeping the walls separation h constant, we find a 2D-3D crossover for the universality class of the liquid-liquid critical point for L/h~50, i.e. for a monolayer thickness that is small compared to its extension. This result is drastically different from what is reported for simple liquids, where the crossover occurs for L/h ~ 5, and is consistent with experimental results and atomistic simulations. We shed light on these findings showing that they are a consequence of the strong cooperativity and the low coordination number of the hydrogen bond network that characterizes water.