Nature Communications (Nov 2021)

Freezing of few nanometers water droplets

  • Alireza Hakimian,
  • Mohammadjavad Mohebinia,
  • Masoumeh Nazari,
  • Ali Davoodabadi,
  • Sina Nazifi,
  • Zixu Huang,
  • Jiming Bao,
  • Hadi Ghasemi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27346-w
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

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Ice nucleation in confined geometries is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but difficult to characterize. Here the authors investigate experimentally the freezing of water nanodroplets surrounded by octane in nanopores down to 2 nm, and demonstrate that the soft curved oil-water interface suppresses heterogeneous ice nucleation, which occurs at a lower temperature than homogenous bulk nucleation.