This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An international collaboration of researchers has used ANSTO's facilities to uncover new properties of one of the most fundamental everyday materials, water, and answer an important scientific question. The findings, published in Nature Communications, have practical implications for understanding water at very low temperatures.
The findings are relevant to cryopreservation of biological materials, food-freezing technologies and understanding water in living cells, where it is often confined at the nanoscale. Water is one of the most familiar substances on Earth, yet it still presents many scientific mysteries. One of the biggest unanswered questions is where the liquid-to-glass transition occurs.
For many other materials, this transition has been observed by cooling them very quickly, or "quenching," to freeze the atoms in place without any organized (crystalline) arrangement. Although we know glassy water exists on Earth within polar clouds, scientists have been unable to observe the liquid-to-glass transition because water forms crystalline ice too rapidly. To approach this problem, rather than looking at bulk water, the team trapped tiny amounts of water within extremely thin layers of lipid-like membranes made of the molecule phytantriol.
A "soft nanoconfinement" prevented water from crystallizing into ice. The team found that water enters a previously hidden glassy state over a much wider temperature range than previously thought. The use of multiple complementary techniques at ANSTO allowed the team to probe water's behavior across time scales ranging from trillionths of a second to microseconds.
Experiments on the Small Angle and Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS/WAXS) beamline were essential to the study, characterizing the structure and low-temperature behavior of phytantriol-water mixtures. Researchers could directly observe how water remains confined within nanoscale layers at temperatures well below its normal freezing point. These measurements provided the structural foundation for the broader investigation into the liquid-to-glass transition of nanoconfined water.
"During his visit to the Australian Synchrotron, Dr. Patrick Züblin of Monash University worked closely with the SAXS/WAXS team to further develop and optimize low-temperature measurements at temperatures as low as -120°C (-184°F)," said Dr. Ashish Sethi, beamline group manager.
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