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Physical chemistry

Square ice in a graphene sandwich

Nature volume 519, pages 417–418 (2015)Cite this article

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Films of ice less than 1 nanometre thick, sandwiched between sheets of graphene, have been observed to adopt a square lattice structure quite different from the widely occurring hexagonal structure of bulk ice. See Letter p.443

Crystals of ice consist of hydrogen-bonded water molecules in a tetrahedral network that has hexagonal symmetry. It is this symmetry that gives rise to the characteristic shapes of snowflakes and the intricate patterns of ice that form on the surfaces of puddles when they freeze. At high pressures, such as 10,000 atmospheres (1 gigapascal; GPa), the underlying tetrahedral geometry of ambient ice is mostly preserved, although the detailed structure undergoes several transformations1. But on page 443 of this issue, Algara-Siller et al.2 describe a high-resolution electron microscopy study of water molecules at high pressure between sheets of the material graphene, and report that the molecules surprisingly adopt a simple, cubic-like symmetry — a bit like scaffolding on the outside of a building, or, more accurately, between two buildings.

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Figure 1: Liquid droplets captured between two sheets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alan K. Soper is at the ISIS Facility, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK.,

    Alan K. Soper

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  1. Alan K. Soper
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Correspondence to Alan K. Soper.

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Soper, A. Square ice in a graphene sandwich. Nature 519, 417–418 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/519417a

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