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Updated: Nov 30, 2025

A Microfluidic Approach for the Study of Ice and Clathrate Hydrate Crystallization
Published on: August 18, 2022
Liquid water contains the building blocks of diverse ice phases
Bartomeu Monserrat1,2, Jan Gerit Brandenburg3,4, Edgar A Engel2
1Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, 27 Charles Babbage Road, Cambridge, CB3 0FS, UK.
Abstract:
Water molecules can arrange into a liquid with complex hydrogen-bond networks and at least 17 experimentally confirmed ice phases with enormous structural diversity. It remains a puzzle how or whether this multitude of arrangements in different phases of water are related. Here we investigate the structural similarities between liquid water and a comprehensive set of 54 ice phases in simulations, by directly comparing their local environments using general atomic descriptors, and also by demonstrating that a machine-learning potential trained on liquid water alone can predict the densities, lattice energies, and vibrational properties of the ices. The finding that the local environments characterising the different ice phases are found in water sheds light on the phase behavior of water, and rationalizes the transferability of water models between different phases.
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