Water can freeze at 2000℃?

Solid or liquid

There are no more than three phases of matter, solid, liquid, and gas, which determine the basic physical properties of matter, and of course there is a relatively special kind of phase-free fluid.

But it is not true that there are no phases; the conditions for the formation of such substances are often very demanding and cannot be found in conventional environments.

Supercritical fluid of carbon dioxide, for example, is a special state that lies between the three and is of great help to geological science.

In another study, perhaps slightly similar to supercritical flow, it also required extreme conditions to emerge.

Ice 18, also known as superionized water. This is another form of water that scientists have discovered today, an unlikely substance that actually exists.

In a nutshell, superionized water is both a solid and a liquid.

It exists in an environment that can completely overturn our conventional understanding. Water can remain solid at a high temperature of 2000℃, in the form of ice.

In the case of superionized water, scientists initially thought it was a real possibility and that it would appear in the gas giant planets Uranus and Neptune.

Earlier, American physicist Percy Bridgman discovered five solid phases of water in 1912.

Later scientists have built on his work, and today more than 17 crystalline ice structures and several amorphous ice structures are known.

The key is the weak hydrogen bonds between water molecules, which are where new superionized water is born under extreme environments and pressures, such as deep planets, where various phases of water appear.

Scientists have theorized that superionized water may occur when the pressure of water exceeds 100 gigahertz and the temperature exceeds 1700 ° C.

Water, at this point, diffuses protons through vacancies in the oxygen solid lattice, giving the ionic conductivity of water more than 100 Siemens per centimeter.

At this point water is as conductive as metal, and when ice is in this superionic state, it has to reach thousands of degrees Celsius to melt.

As the water molecules form a tightly packed oxygen lattice, new ice forms emerge.

Before the 1990s, scientists mainly used molecular dynamics simulations to predict the presence of superionized water.

Although theorized for decades, experimental evidence for superionized water emerged only later.

A 1999 scientific analysis showed that Neptune and Uranus could meet the conditions for superionized water, in the form of ammonia and water on those two planets.

The first experimental evidence came from optical measurements of laser-heated water in a diamond anvil chamber.

In the 21st century, scientists gradually learned the truth of superionized water through the laboratory and were able to make superionized water with experimental equipment.

The eighteenth state of ice

We have a basic understanding of the properties of superionized water, which is obviously very difficult to represent in the laboratory.

The researchers first used a small drop of water, just 30 microns thick and 1.5 millimeters wide, and filled in a small cavity formed between two thin diamond disks.

The scientists then placed the tiny drop of water in the Laser Energy Laboratory at the University of Rochester.

Six more high-power lasers were used to generate a series of shock waves through the vacuum at the center of the Omega laser's target chamber.

The phase change of this small drop of water is done by simulating the environment of high temperature and pressure.

To test this part of the hypothesis, the researchers took X-ray diffraction measurements of the sample within a billionth of a second of the blast wave.

The measurements were carried out using an extra set of 16 high-power lasers, which emit 8, 000 joules of light in a nanosecond into a 2 mm square sheet of thin iron foil.

The tiny patch of foil creates a 250-micron light spot that affects the water droplets on it.

Under such intense radiation, most of the iron foil evaporates and ionizes into hot plasma.

It initially emits X-ray photons at very specific energies, due to the extremely tiny nanoice cubes that have just formed.

Some of these X-rays will be diffracted and hit by the beam to appear in the image plate detector.

The equipment will help researchers confirm that the atoms are arranged in a regular lattice, and experiments show that they have indeed solidified from liquid water into a crystalline oxygen lattice of superionized water ice in just three to five nanoseconds.

The experiment confirmed the existence of superionized water ice, so it is likely to be found deep inside a gas planet like Uranus.

The lattice in the superionized water has definite, direct characteristics, and the ice should not rotate as fast as Earth's liquid iron fluid, the scientists explained.

Instead, if it were to appear in Uranus, it would look something like the mantle. So on geological time scales, superion ice can be convective.

Research now suggests that superionized water could help scientists better understand the inner structures of ice giants, water-rich exoplanets like them and even explain the magnetic fields of such ice giants.

This reliance on machine learning methods to optimize molecular dynamics performance in experiments enables the use of advanced free energy sampling methods to accurately determine phase boundaries.

This experiment will continue in the future, although it is not seen in daily life, but it has a lot of use in machine learning, ice giant research, future research on ice morphology is very hopeful.