Order and disorder in crystalline ice explained

A fascinating substance with unique properties, ice has intrigued humans since time immemorial. Unlike most other materials, ice at very low temperature is not as ordered as it could be. A collaboration between the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the Institute of Physics Rosario (IFIR-UNR), with the support of the Istituto Officina dei Materiali of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-IOM), made new theoretical inroads on the reasons why this happens and on the way in which some of the missing order can be recovered. In that ordered state the team of scientists have described a relatively obscure and yet fundamental property of very low temperature ice: ferroelectricity. The results, published in PNAS, are likely to extend to ice surfaces, a possibility that could be relevant to the agglomeration of ice particles in interstellar space.

“In an ideally ordered piece of ice the hydrogen atoms of each water molecule should point in the same direction, like soldiers in a platoon looking in front of them,” explains Alessandro Laio, physicist of SISSA and ICTP. “If that was the case, ice would exhibit a macroscopic electric polarization — it would be ferroelectric. Instead, water molecules in ice, even at very low temperature, behave like unruly soldiers, and all look in different directions.”

This anomalous behavior, discovered experimentally in the 1930s, was immediately and famou

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