Ice Particles Sink below the Water Surface Due to a Balance of Salt, van der Waals, and Buoyancy Forces

Thiyam, Priyadarshini; Fiedler, Johannes; Buhmann, Stefan Yoshi; Persson, Clas; Brevik, Iver; Boström, Mathias; Parsons, Drew F.

doi:10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b02351

Cited by 21 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…In some situations double layer interaction energy be significant in comparison to the Lifshitz energy as was discussed in Ref. [41], which could be extended to the spherical geometry.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Role of zero point energy in promoting ice formation in a spherical drop of water

Parashar

Shajesh

Milton

et al. 2019

Phys. Rev. Research

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We demonstrate that the Lifshitz interaction energy (excluding the self-energies of the inner and outer spherical regions) for three concentric spherical dielectric media can be evaluated easily using the immense computation power in recent processors relative to those of a few decades ago. As a prototype, we compute the Lifshitz interaction energy for a spherical shell of water immersed in water vapor of infinite extent while enclosing a spherical ball of ice inside the shell, such that two concentric spherical interfaces are formed: one between solid ice and liquid water and the other between liquid water and gaseous vapor. We evaluate the Lifshitz interaction energy for the above configuration at the triple point of water when the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of water coexist, and, thus, extend the analysis of Elbaum and Schick in Phys. Rev. Lett. 66 (1991) 1713 to spherical configurations. We find that, when the Lifshitz energy contributes dominantly to the total energy of this system, which is often the case when electrostatic interactions are absent, a drop of water surrounded by vapor of infinite extent is not stable at the triple point. This instability, that is a manifestation of the quantum fluctuations in the medium, will induce nucleation of ice in water, which will then grow in size indefinitely. This is a consequence of the finding here that the Lifshitz energy is minimized for large (micrometer size) radius of the ice ball and small (nanometer size) thickness of the water shell surrounding the ice. These results might be relevant to the formation of hail in thunderclouds. These results are tentative in that the self-energies are omitted. * Prachi.Parashar@jalc.edu † with inter-atomic forces. However, the astonishing feat of Casimir [10] was in showing that London dispersion forces, or the van der Waals interactions, were manifestations of the zero point energy.Casimir evaluated the energy of a planar cavity with perfectly conducting walls, an overly idealized system, that is obtained from the configuration of Fig. 1 when the regions labeled as ε 1 and ε 2 are perfect electrical conductors that are separated by vacuum in the background region labeled ε 3 . Lifshitz [11] generalized Casimir's result by evaluating the energy for a configuration of Fig. 1 consisting of two dielectric media of infinite extent separated by vacuum. The Lifshitz energy leads to the Casimir energy in the perfect conducting limit of the dielectric functions for the outer media. Dzyaloshinskii, Lifshitz, and Pitaevskii (DLP) [12] extended these considerations for the case when the background region in the planar configuration of Fig. 1 is another uniform dielectric medium. The main idea underlying these groundbreaking works is that quantum fluctuations of fields in the media can be manifested in physical phenomena involving dielectrics. Among these, we point out that the configurations considered by Casimir and Lifshitz always lead to an attractive pressure (tending to decrease the thickness of the intervening medium). I...

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“…In some situations double layer interaction energy be significant in comparison to the Lifshitz energy as was discussed in Ref. [41], which could be extended to the spherical geometry.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Role of zero point energy in promoting ice formation in a spherical drop of water

Parashar

Shajesh

Milton

et al. 2019

Phys. Rev. Research

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“…They are independent of the water and ice models for dielectric functions, and are clearly important effects behind ice premelting [55,56,57]. Here, one should also recall the recent predictions from Thiyam et al [53] that ionic forces, due to self-consistently set-up pH-dependent charges at the ice-water interface in a salt concentration, will often be dominant and, typically, be repulsive.…”

Section: Ice Growth and Premelting At The Triple Point Of Watermentioning

confidence: 83%

“…In the absence of seeding particles, ice freezes from a water surface rather than from inside bulk water due to differences in density. This is the famous Archimedes principle at play via buoyancy force [53]. It is also well known that an ice surface both above and slightly below the freezing temperature of water has a thin film of melted water at its surface [19].…”

Section: Ice Growth and Premelting At The Triple Point Of Watermentioning

confidence: 94%

Full-Spectrum High-Resolution Modeling of the Dielectric Function of Water

et al. 2020

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In view of the vital role of water in chemical and physical processes, an exact knowledge of its dielectric function over a large frequency range is important. In this article we report on currently available measurements of the dielectric function of water at room temperature (25 • C) across the full electromagnetic spectrum: microwave, IR, UV and X-ray (up to 100 eV). We provide parameterisations of the complex dielectric function of water with two Debye (microwave) oscillators and high resolution of IR and UV/X-ray oscillators. We also report dielectric parameters for ice-cold water with a microwave/IR spectrum measured at 0.4 • C, while taking the UV spectrum from 25 • C (assuming negligible temperature dependence in UV). We illustrate the consequences of the model via calculations of van der Waals interactions of gas molecules near water surfaces, and an assessment of the thickness of water films on ice and ice films on water. In contrast to earlier models of ice-cold water, we predict that a micron-scale layer of ice is stabilised on a bulk water surface. Similarly, the van der Waals interaction promotes complete freezing rather than supporting a thin premelting layer of water on a bulk ice surface. Density-based extrapolation from warm to cold water of the dielectric function at imaginary frequencies is found to be satisfactory in the microwave but poor (40% error) at IR frequencies.

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“…It can be stabilised by repulsive Casimir (Lifshitz) forces, [1,2,3] and under variable conditions (e.g. different temperatures, presence of salt ions and impurities, [3,4,5,6,7] diverse geometries, [7,8] etc) thicker or thinner films can occur. Beside effects arising from impurity charges, [4,5,9] diverse strategies have been proposed that could also lead to the formation of thicker liquid water films.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%