Physicists make crystal/liquid interface visible for first time

"Imagine you're a water molecule in a glass of ice water, and you're floating right on the boundary of the ice and the water," proposes Emory University physicist Eric Weeks. "So how do you know if you're a solid or a liquid?"

Weeks' lab recently captured the first images of what's actually happening in this fuzzy area of the crystal/liquid interface. The lab's data, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), make the waves between the two states of matter visible for the first time.

"The theory that surface waves move along the crystal/liquid boundary - the intrinsic interface - dates back to 1965 and is well established," says Weeks, associate professor of physics. "What we've done is found a way to take a picture of the intrinsic interface, measure it, and show how it fluctuates over time."

The visual evidence shows that the fuzzy region between the two states is extremely narrow, Weeks says. "The transition from completely organized to completely disorganized goes very quickly, spatially."

Modeling states of matter

Weeks' lab uses tiny plastic balls, each about the size of a cell nucleus, to model states of matter. Samples of these colloids can be fine-tuned into liquid or crystal states by changing the concentrations of the particles suspended in a solution.

"Water molecules are too small too study while they are fluctuating," Weeks explains. "We used the plastic spheres to resize an experiment to a scale that we could observe. You lose some of the detail when you do this, but you hope it's not the critical detail."

The experiment took a great deal of trial and error, says Jessica Hernández-Guzmán, a graduate student in physics and the lead author of the PNAS article. "I was looking for that transition," she says. "I knew what the colloids looked like in a crystal state, and I knew what they looked like as a liquid, but I didn't know what they looked like in-between. When I finally saw (the transition), I felt like I had won the lottery."

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