Slow compression of crystalline ice at low temperature

Bauer, R.*; Tse, J. S.*; Komatsu, Kazuki*; Machida, Shinichi*; Hattori, Takanori

Nature, 585(7825), p.E9 - E10, 2020/09

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2697-7

Pressure-induced structural transformations in deuterated crystalline ice-Ih were studied in-situ at 100 K using neutron diffraction. Very long relaxation time was allowed between small pressure increments to promote transformations to the thermodynamic stable high pressure crystalline phases. The results contradict a recent report in which measurements under similar temperature and pressure environment show successive crystal-to-crystal transformations (Tulk, et.al., Nature 2019). Instead, ice Ih was found to transform partially to an amorphous form (high density amorphous, HDA) at 1.0 GPa and then ice VII started to emerge at 1.5 GPa, a pressure substantially lower than all earlier studies. During this pressure interval, crystalline ice Ih or ice VII co-exist with HDA. The ice VII formed is stable upon pressure release down to 0.1 GPa. The very low compression rate has a profound effect on the crystallinity in the amorphous regime. Gathering all the existing experimental evidences allows an unambiguous description of the phenomenon of pressure induced amorphization. The onset of the phase transition is triggered by a shear instability of the ice lattice. The co-existence ice VII with HDA, instead of the equilibrium thermodynamic stable and proton-ordered ice-VIII under the same pressure-temperature condition reveals at low temperature there is insufficient thermal energy to overcome the substantial geometrical rearrangement from a single proton disordered H-bond network to an interpenetrating proton ordered H-bond crystalline network. Thus, leaving the proton disordered H-network intact. The analysis shows unequivocally that the structure obtained from the compression of ice is controlled by kinetics and dependent on the temperature.