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The preparation and structure of salty ice VII under pressure

Nature Materials volume 8, pages 405–409 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

It is widely accepted that ice, no matter what phase, is unable to incorporate large amounts of salt into its structure. This conclusion is based on the observation that on freezing of salt water, ice expels the salt almost entirely as brine. Here, we show that this behaviour is not an intrinsic physico-chemical property of ice phases. We demonstrate by neutron diffraction that substantial amounts of dissolved LiCl can be built homogeneously into the ice VII structure if it is produced by recrystallization of its glassy (amorphous) state under pressure. Such ‘alloyed’ ice VII has significantly different structural properties compared with pure ice VII, such as an 8% larger unit cell volume, 5 times larger displacement factors, an absence of a transition to an ordered ice VIII structure and plasticity. Our study suggests that there could be a whole new class of ‘salty’ high-pressure ice forms.

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Figure 1: Neutron diffraction patterns of LiCl·6D2O under pressure.
Figure 2: Diffraction pattern of LiCl·6D2O at 4 GPa and 280 K.
Figure 3: Structure of pure and salty ice VII.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to W.F. Kuhs for pointing out the issue of plasticity in ice VII. We thank J.-L. Laborier (ILL), G. Hamel and J. Philippe for technical assistance and advice, as well as R. Pick, F. Frey and M. Schmidbauer for helpful discussions. A.M.S. acknowledges support from the French National Supercomputing Facility IDRIS, where all of the calculations have been carried out under the projects CP9-71387 and CP9-81387. This work is partially based on experiments carried out at the Swiss spallation source SINQ, Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMPMC, CNRS-UMR 7590, Université P&M Curie, 75252 Paris, France

    Stefan Klotz, Livia E. Bove & Antonino M. Saitta

  2. Laboratory for Neutron Scattering, ETH Zurich and Paul Scherrer Institut, CH-5232 Villigen, Switzerland

    Thierry Strässle

  3. Institut Laue Langevin, BP 156, F-38042 Grenoble, France

    Thomas C. Hansen

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  1. Stefan Klotz
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  2. Livia E. Bove
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  3. Thierry Strässle
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  4. Thomas C. Hansen
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  5. Antonino M. Saitta
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Contributions

S.K., L.E.B, T.S. and T.C.H. carried out the experiments and A.M.S. the calculations. S.K. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Stefan Klotz.

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Klotz, S., Bove, L., Strässle, T. et al. The preparation and structure of salty ice VII under pressure. Nature Mater 8, 405–409 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2422

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