Ice IV from supercooled water; Reproducible crystallization, structure, and ordering

Kobayashi, Hiroki*; Komatsu, Kazuki*; Ito, Hayate*; Machida, Shinichi*; Hattori, Takanori   ; Kagi, Hiroyuki*

Ice IV, a metastable high-pressure phase of ice, rarely crystallizes from water and has therefore been called by a nickname, "will-o'-the-wisp," a tentative, ghostly form of ice. Here we report by experiments using water-in-oil emulsions that liquid water reproducibly and selectively crystallizes into ice IV at the homogeneous nucleation temperature () at pressures between 0.45 and 1.1 GPa. By tracking pressure-induced melting of ice Ih and immediate recrystallization, we show that liquid water preferentially crystallizes into ice IV even below . Thanks to high hydrostaticity and suppressed crystal growth in emulsified ice samples, reliable structure analyses for both ice IV and its potentially hydrogen-ordered state were achieved by neutron diffraction. The achievable degree of ordering in experiments was extremely low and nearly independent of the crystallization methods.