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Scientists find way to make water freeze at boiling temperatures
- soperj 10y agoThis reminds me of an experiment my physics teacher did in gr.12. The way he explained it was that water would boil when there was a temperature delta, so he boiled some water in a test tube, to eliminate most of the air in the tube, and then plugged it and removed it from the heat. Let it cool down and then put it on ice. It looked like full rolling boil. I've never tried it again since.
- dhimes 10y agoThe boiling point depends on pressure. It sounds like he reduced the pressure in the testtube be getting the air out and letting the water vapor condense- then the liquid boiled. Clever.
- james_a_craig 10y agoI wonder if the forced phase-change the confinement causes applies to other contexts? Could we use a similar trick to force superconductive materials into their low-temperature superconductive phase at higher temperatures?
- bskdjx 10y agoYes, somehow. What they technically did is raise the chemical potential, mu, of the gas phase (the phase with the lowest mu wins). TL/DR, but I'm not too impressed from a theoretical POV. The problem to replicate this is "what do you do to raise the mu of the non super-conducting phase?". That's not trivial as many things raise the mu of the super conducting phase instead, like applied magnetic fields.
- richardboegli 10y agoActual article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13061282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13061282
- JoeAltmaier 10y agohttp://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html Looks like plenty of ranges where boiling water can freeze with a pressure change.