Scientists find way to make water freeze at boiling temperatures

newatlas.com

31 points·futureguy··6 comments

This 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.

The 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.

I 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?

Yes, 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.

http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html

Looks like plenty of ranges where boiling water can freeze with a pressure change.

Actual article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13061282

Reply on news.ycombinator.com