No Arabic abstract
Water freezes below 0 {deg}C at ambient pressure, ordinarily to ice Ih with an ABAB... hexagonal stacking sequence. However, it is also known to produce ice Ic nominally with an ABCABC... cubic stacking sequence under certain conditions1, and its existence in Earths atmosphere, or in comets is debated. Ice Ic, or called as cubic ice, was first identified in 1943 by Konig, who used electron microscopy to study the condensation of ice from water vapor to a cold substrate. Subsequently, many different routes to ice Ic have been established, such as the dissociation of gas hydrates, warming amorphous ices or annealing high-pressure ices recovered at ambient pressure, freezing of $mu$- or nano-confined water. Despite the numerous studies on ice Ic, its structure has not been fully verified, because the diffraction patterns of ice Ic show signatures of stacking-disorder, and ideal ice Ic without stacking-disorder had not been formed until very recently. Here we demonstrate a route to obtain ice Ic without stacking-disorder by degassing hydrogen from the high-pressure form of hydrogen hydrate, C$_2$, which has a host framework that is isostructural with ice Ic. Surprisingly, the stacking-disorder free ice Ic is formed from C$_2$ via an intermediate amorphous or nano-crystalline form under decompression, unlike the direct transformations that occur in the cases of recently discovered ice XVI from neon hydrate, or ice XVII from hydrogen hydrate. The obtained ice Ic shows remarkable thermal stability until the phase transition to ice Ih at 250 K; this thermal stability originates from the lack of dislocations, which promote changes in the stacking sequence. This discovery of ideal ice Ic will promote understanding of the role of stacking-disorder on the physical properties of ice as a counter end-member of ice Ih.
Among the over eighteen different forms of water ice, only the common hexagonal phase and a cubic phase are present in nature on Earth. The existence of these two polytypes, almost degenerate in energy, represents one of the most important and unresolved topics in the physics of ice. It is now widely recognised that all the samples of cubic ice obtained so far are instead a stacking-disordered form of ice I (i.e. ice Isd), in which both hexagonal and cubic stacking sequences of hydrogen-bonded water molecules are present. Here we describe a new method to obtain cubic ice Ic in large quantities, and demonstrate its unprecedented structural purity from two independent neutron diffraction experiments performed on two of the leading neutron diffraction instruments in Europe.
The object of this study is the kinetic process of solid-liquid first-order phase transition - melting of carbon dioxide CS-I hydrate with various cavity occupation ratios. The work was done within a framework of study on the local structure of water molecules. These include the time depending change of the short-range order at temperatures close to the melting point and comparison with hexagonal ice structure. Using molecular dynamics method, dependencies of the internal energy of the studied systems on the time of heating were found. Jumps in the internal energy of solids in the range at 275-300 K indicate a phase transition. The study of oxygen-oxygen radial distribution and hydrogen-oxygen-oxygen mutual orientation angles between molecules detached at no more than 3.2 angstroms allowed to find the H-bond coordination number of all molecules and full number of H-bonds and showed the instant (less than 1 nanosecond) reorganization of short-range order of all molecules. The structure analysis of every neighbor water molecules pairs showed the ~10-15 percents decrease of H-bond number after the melting whereas all molecules form single long-range hydrogen bond network. The analysis of hydrogen bond network showed the minor changes in the H-bond interaction energy at solid-liquid phase transition.
Knowledge of the behavior of hydrogen in metal hydrides is the key for understanding their electronic properties. So far, no experimental methods exist to access these properties beyond 100 GPa, where high-Tc superconductivity emerges. Here, we present an 1H-NMR study of cubic FeH up to 200GPa. We observe a distinct deviation from the ideal metallic behavior between 64 and 110 GPa that suggests pressure-induced H-H interactions. Accompanying ab-initio calculations support this interpretation, as they reveal the formation of an intercalating sublattice of electron density, which enhances the hydrogen contribution to the electronic density of states at the Fermi level. This study shows that pressure induced H-H interactions can occur in metal hydrides at much lower compression and larger H-H distances than previously thought and stimulates an alternative pathway in the search for novel high-temperature superconductors.
The two-dimensional (2D) C3N has emerged as a material with promising applications in high performance device owing to its intrinsic bandgap and tunable electronic properties. Although there are several reports about the bandgap tuning of C3N via stacking or forming nanoribbon, bandgap modulation of bilayer C3N nanoribbons (C3NNRs) with various edge structures is still far from well understood. Here, based on extensive first-principles calculations, we demonstrated the effective bandgap engineering of C3N by cutting it into hydrogen passivated C3NNRs and stacking them into bilayer heterostructures. It was found that armchair (AC) C3NNRs with three types of edge structures are all semiconductors, while only zigzag (ZZ) C3NNRs with edges composed of both C and N atoms (ZZ-CN/CN) are semiconductors. The bandgaps of all semiconducting C3NNRs are larger than that of C3N nanosheet. More interestingly, AC-C3NNRs with CN/CN edges (AC-CN/CN) possess direct bandgap while ZZ-CN/CN have indirect bandgap. Compared with the monolayer C3NNR, the bandgaps of bilayer C3NNRs can be greatly modulated via different stacking orders and edge structures, varying from 0.43 eV for ZZ-CN/CN with AB-stacking to 0.04 eV for AC-CN/CN with AA-stacking. Particularly, transition from direct to indirect bandgap was observed in the bilayer AC-CN/CN heterostructure with AA-stacking, and the indirect-to-direct transition was found in the bilayer ZZ-CN/CN with AB-stacking. This work provides insights into the effective bandgap engineering of C3N and offers a new opportunity for its applications in nano-electronics and optoelectronic devices.
Hydrogen bond symmetrisations in H-bonded systems triggered by pressure induced nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) is a long-known concept1 but experimental evidences in high-pressure ices have remained elusive with conventional methods2,3. Theoretical works predicted quantum-mechanical tunneling of protons within water ices to occur at pressures above 30 GPa and the H-bond symmetrisation transition above 60 GPa4. Here, we used 1H-NMR on high-pressure ice up to 90 GPa, and demonstrate that NQEs govern the behavior of the hydrogen bonded protons in ice VII already at significantly lower pressures than previously expected. A pronounced tunneling mode was found to be present up to the highest pressures of 90 GPa, well into the stability field of ice X, where NQEs are not anticipated in a fully symmetrized H-bond network. We found two distinct transitions in the NMR shift data at about 20 GPa and 75 GPa attributed to the step-wise symmetrization of the H-bond (HB), with high-barrier H-Bonds (HBHB) to low-barrier H-bonds (LBHB) and LBHB to symmetric H-bonds (SHB) respectively. These transitions could have major implication on the physical properties of high-pressure ices and planetary interior models. NQEs observed in this chemically simple system over a wide pressure range could prove to be useful in designing a new generation of electronic devices exploiting protonic tunneling.