Water in 2000 ℃ high temperature can actually freeze? Water actually has a 20th form: ice 18

There are only three phases of matter, solid, liquid, and gaseous, three phases determine the basic physical properties of matter, of course, there is a relatively special no-phase fluid.

However, it is not true that there is no phase state, but the conditions for the formation of such substances are often very harsh and cannot be found in conventional environments.

The supercritical fluid of carbon dioxide, for example, is a special state that lies between the three and is of great interest to geoscience research.

In another study, perhaps with some similarities to supercritical fluids, it also requires extreme environments to occur.

Ice 18, also known as superionic water. This is another form of water that scientists have discovered today, a seemingly impossible substance that exists.

In simple terms, superionic water is both a solid and a liquid.

It exists in an environment that can completely overturn our conventional perceptions, with water being able to remain solid even at temperatures as high as 2000°C, in the form of ice.

Regarding superionic water, scientists first thought it was indeed possible and appeared in large gas planets like Uranus and Neptune.

Even earlier, the American physicist Bosie Bridgman discovered five solid phase states of water in 1912.

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

The key here lies in the weak hydrogen bonds between water molecules, and the extreme environments and pressures, such as the depths of planets, where the new superionic water is born.

Scientists theorize that superionic water may appear when water exceeds a pressure of 100 gigapascals and a temperature of more than 1700 degrees Celsius.

At this time, water diffuses protons through vacancies in the oxygen solid lattice, causing the ionic conductivity of water to exceed 100 Siemens per centimeter.

The conductivity of water at this time will be as high as that of metal, and when ice is in this superionic state, it must reach thousands of degrees Celsius to melt it.

As the water molecule structure forms a tightly packed lattice of oxygen, new forms of ice bodies emerge.

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

Although theorized for decades, experimental evidence for superionic water emerged only after this time.

Scientific analysis in 1999 showed that Neptune and Uranus were able to meet the conditions for the existence of superionic water, and ammonia and water would then appear in this form on both planets.

The initial experimental evidence came from the initial determination of optical measurements of water heated by laser in a diamond anvil chamber.

It was only in the 21st century that scientists gradually learned the truth about super ionized water through the laboratory and were able to use experimental equipment to make super ionized water.

The 18th state of ice

While we have learned about the properties of super ionized water, it is clear that it is very difficult to demonstrate them in the laboratory.

The researchers first used a small drop of water, only 30 microns thick and 1.5 millimeters wide, and filled it into a small cavity formed between two thin diamond discs.

The scientists then placed this small drop of water in the University of Rochester's Laser Energy Laboratory.

A vacuum in the center of the OMEGA laser target chamber was then used to generate a series of shock waves using six high-powered lasers.

This small drop of water was subjected to a phase change by simulating a high temperature and pressure environment.

To test this part of the hypothesis, the researchers performed X-ray diffraction measurements on the sample within a billionth of a second after the shock wave was emitted.

The measurements were performed using an additional set of 16 high-powered laser beams, which allowed 8,000 joules of light to be emitted into a thin 2-square-millimeter iron foil in 1 nanosecond.

This tiny patch of foil appears as a 250-micron spot of light and affects the water droplets on it.

With such an intense radiation environment, most of the iron foil is evaporated and ionized into a hot plasma.

At first X-ray, photons are emitted at very specific energies, which are caused by the extremely tiny nano-ice that has just formed.

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

The associated equipment will help researchers confirm that the atoms are arranged in a regular lattice, and experiments show that they do indeed solidify from liquid water into the crystalline oxygen lattice of superionic water ice in just 3 to 5 nanoseconds.

This experiment confirms the existence of superionic water ice, so this material is likely to present deep inside the interior of a gaseous planet like Uranus.

The scientists also explained that the lattice in superionic water has clear and direct characteristics and that this ice should not be spinning as fast as the liquid iron fluid on Earth.

On the contrary, if it appears in Uranus, it should behave similarly to the mantle. Thus, in geological time scales, superionic ice would occur as convection.

Today's research suggests that superionic water could help scientists better understand the internal structure of icy giant planets, as well as water-rich exoplanets similar to them, and could even explain the magnetic fields of such ice giants.

According to NASA Voyager 2, the magnetic fields of ice giants like Uranus are very different from the dipole fields of Earth and other planets.

Uranus and Neptune are called ice giants because their interiors are composed mainly of water, ammonia, and methane.

But the extremely high pressures and temperatures meet just the right conditions for these substances to change, so scientists speculate that substances like superionic water are likely to be the main component of Uranus.

In addition, no probe has explored these ice giants in more detail, so human understanding of them is still very small today, and their internal environment remains a mystery.

At present, these ice giants have very strange non-axisymmetric, non-dipole magnetic fields, which are completely different from those of other planets in our solar system.

Though several planets have similar compositional structures in terms of mass and density, they are essentially very different.

Because Neptune has an internal heat source, but Uranus emits almost no material, Uranus appears to be much "colder".

We now know that superionic water affects the magnetic field, but further research is needed to help us understand the universe in the future.

It is worth mentioning that ice 18 will show a big difference in appearance.

Unlike the transparent ice crystals we generally see, superionic water forms a lattice body because the oxygen atoms are locked in their proper places like in a solid.

And its hydrogen atoms become ions after the electrons are removed and the electrons in the nucleus disappear, so they are positively charged.

This makes ice 18 then take on the bizarre state of being both a solid and moving slowly like a fluid.

Without an applied electric field

We can also understand it this way, if we think of ice as a cube, then each corner will have a lattice of oxygen atoms connected by hydrogen.

When it transforms into a new superionic phase, the lattice expands and the hydrogen atoms escape, but the oxygen atoms stay in their fixed positions, and the solid oxygen lattice appears to be floating in a sea of hydrogen atoms.

Experiments on superionic water and thinking about ice giants have led scientists to believe that most of the water in the universe will probably behave in this superionic phase.

But it is still difficult to fully reveal the whole mystery through superionic water experiments, first of all, it is too difficult to create such a piece of ice.

H + ions migrate toward the anode when an electric field is applied

The location of the hydrogen cannot be determined during the experiment, and the temperature measurement in the dynamic compression experiment is also very troublesome.

In general, ice 18 experiments mainly come from the design phase and the interpretation of results to provide relevant guidance.

In further research, however, there are already scientific teams using machine learning techniques to understand atomic interactions from a quantum computer.

This has led to progress in the ability to deal with superionic water at long time scales.

A machine learning approach to optimize molecular dynamics in experiments so that reliance can be placed on advanced free energy sampling methods to accurately determine phase boundaries.

The experiments will continue in the future, and although this is not seen in everyday life, it has several roles in machine learning, ice giant research, and future research on ice formations that inspire confidence.