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Annealed high-density amorphous ice under pressure

Nature Physics volume 2, pages 414–418 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

The well-known expansion of water on cooling below 277 K is one of several peculiar properties that could signal a second critical point near 220 K and 0.1 GPa in pressure, deep in the supercooled liquid phase. Evidence for this would be a first-order transition line between two distinct supercooled liquids at temperatures below the critical point. As that lies below the minimum crystallization temperature, experimental tests have instead used low- and high-density amorphous ices—LDA and HDA—as proxies for the supercooled liquids. But numerous studies over the past decade have not yielded a clear consensus about the nature of the HDA/LDA transition. Here we identify a previously uncharacterized state of high-density amorphous ice obtained if HDA is annealed at pressures near 2 kbar. The transition between this annealed HDA and LDA is strikingly different from the behaviour found in earlier work, in a way that favours the two-liquid model.

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Figure 1: P–T stability fields of LDA, HDA and VHDA.
Figure 2: Position of the first diffraction peak in high-density amorphous ices, as a function of P and T.
Figure 3: Behaviour of recovered high-density amorphous ices on warming at ambient pressure.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Rousse for assistance with preliminary experiments, O. Mishima, D. D. Klug and M. M. Koza for supplementary information and comment, I. Kohl and T. Loerting for additional information about work in ref. 15, and A. M. Saitta, C. Salzmann, K. D. Refson, A. K. Soper and W. C. K. Poon for discussions. We acknowledge support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the ISIS Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Commission of the European Union (T.S.).

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  1. Thierry Strässle

    Present address: Laboratory for Neutron Scattering, ETH Zürich and Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232, Villigen PSI, Switzerland

Authors and Affiliations

  1. SUPA, School of Physics and Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions, University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK

    Richard J. Nelmes, John S. Loveday, Craig L. Bull & Malcolm Guthrie

  2. Physique des Milieux Denses, IMPMC, CNRS-UMR 7590, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 75252, Paris, France

    Thierry Strässle, Gérard Hamel & Stefan Klotz

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Correspondence to Richard J. Nelmes or John S. Loveday.

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Nelmes, R., Loveday, J., Strässle, T. et al. Annealed high-density amorphous ice under pressure. Nature Phys 2, 414–418 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys313

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