Institute of Physics | via EurekAlert | 22 July 2010
Ultrahigh compression of water using intense heavy ion beams: laboratory planetary physicsWe know 'icy' Neptune is partially comprised of water molecules but until now we have had little means to test how water behaves in the extreme conditions that Neptune presents.
This is about to change as an international group of physicists draw up plans to use the new Facility for Antiprotons and Ion Research (FAIR) in Germany, which will be ready in 2015, to expose water molecules to heavy ion beams and thereby generate the same level of pressure on the water molecules that they experience within the very inhospitable core of Neptune.
The new plans being published in New Journal of Physics (co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society) today, Thursday 22 July, explain how using high energy uranium beams in the future German facility is going to enable researchers to create conditions that push water molecules into a 'superionic' state and thereby observe water in conditions never before replicated.
The predicted 'superionic' state is an exotic hybrid phase of water composed of an oxygen lattice and a hydrogen liquid which under ambient conditions form stable H2O molecules in an ice lattice or in a liquid.
- New Journal of Physics 12 073022 (July 2010) doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/12/7/073022