Grain boundary melting in ice


Peer Reviewed

Thomson ES, Hansen-Goos H, Wettlaufer JS, & Wilen LA


The Journal of Chemical Physics 138, Issue 12, pages 124707, 2013, 10.1063/1.4797468.


We describe an optical scattering study of grain boundary premelting in water ice. Ubiquitous long ranged attractive polarization forces act to suppress grain boundary melting whereas repulsive forces originating in screened Coulomb interactions and classical colligative effects enhance it. The liquid enhancing effects can be manipulated by adding dopant ions to the system. For all measured grain boundaries this leads to increasing premelted film thickness with increasing electrolyte concentration. Although we understand that the interfacial surface chargedensities q s and solute concentrations can potentially dominate the film thickness, we cannot directly measure them within a given grain boundary. Therefore, as a framework for interpreting the data we consider two appropriate q s dependent limits; one is dominated by the colligative effect and other is dominated by electrostatic interactions.

Keywords: Grain boundaries, Ice, Surface charge, Electrolytes, Solution processes
Categories: Antarctic, Arctic, Natural Science