The group led by Assistant Professor Hiromasa Niinomi of Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University, has discovered that an unknown water layer, which separates from the surrounding bulk water, forms via spinodal phase separation-like dynamics at the interface between ultrapure water and high-pressure ice III with crystal chirality. They also found that the fast Fourier transformation of the bicontinuous pattern formed by the spinodal-like dynamics shows chiral vortex-like pattern. This result implies that the unknown water is a liquid crystal layer with a macroscopically chiral structure.
These results were published in the academic journal “The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters” on January 11, 2024.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.3c03006