Laurence Fried and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California decided to see if they could get water to go superionic. To do so, they recreated the conditions inside the giant planets of our Solar System. Such planets are extremely hot (more than 1,000 ºC) and have extremely high pressure (some 100,000 times the pressure on earth). The team used a device that smashed water between two diamonds. Then they heated the water with an infrared laser. The calculations and experiments appear to show water shifting to a superionic phase. It has been predicted for years that water in this weird state is structured such that the oxygen atoms are essentially frozen, but the hydrogen atoms can whiz around at high speed.

“By looking at [the frequency with which the water molecules vibrated] we are able to determine phase boundaries, but we don’t really know what is on the other side of the boundary.”

The researchers also studied computer models of the atoms’ behaviour, which suggested that the water had indeed entered a superionic phase, a strange state between solid and liquid. Tracking a group of some 60 simulated atoms took weeks, and required computing power equivalent to 1,000 laptops.

Why I blog this? It is cool science and I like to keep track of projects which require decent amounts of computing power. The amount of processing power in the world will continue expanding rapidly, and the price to compute will continue to drop. Thus, any problem which requires a lot of work to solve and is considered hard now could possibly be within reach a few years from now. My computer science background and entrepreneurial mindset scream “Opportunities abound!”

via news@nature.com