Amorphous ice: stepwise formation of very-high-density amorphous ice from low-density amorphous ice at 125 K.
On compressing low-density amorphous ice (LDA) at 125 K up to 1.6 GPa, two distinct density steps accompanied by heat evolution are observable in pressure-density curves. Samples recovered to 77 K and 1 bar after the first and second steps show the x-ray diffraction pattern of high-density amorphous ice (HDA) and very HDA (VHDA), respectively. The compression of the once formed HDA takes place linearly in density up to 0.95 GPa, where nonlinear densification and HDA --> VHDA conversion is initiated. This implies a stepwise formation process LDA--> HDA --> VHDA at 125 K, which is to the best of our knowledge the first observation of a stepwise amorphous-amorphous-amorphous transformation sequence. We infer that the relation of HDA and VHDA is very similar to the relation between LDA and HDA except for a higher activation barrier between the former. We discuss the two options of thermodynamic versus kinetic origin of the phenomenon.
Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
Thomas
T
Loerting
Werner
W
Schustereder
Katrin
K
Winkel
Christoph G
CG
Salzmann
Ingrid
I
Kohl
Erwin
E
Mayer