Electron diffraction of deeply supercooled water in no man’s land

Abstract

A generally accepted understanding of the anomalous properties of water will only emerge if it becomes possible to systematically characterize water in the deeply supercooled regime, from where the anomalies appear to emanate. This has largely remained elusive because water crystallizes rapidly between 160 K and 232 K. Here, we present an experimental approach to rapidly prepare deeply supercooled water at a well-defined temperature and probe it with electron diffraction before crystallization occurs. We show that as water is cooled from room temperature to cryogenic temperature, its structure evolves smoothly, approaching that of amorphous ice just below 200 K. Our experiments narrow down the range of possible explanations for the origin of the water anomalies and open up new avenues for studying supercooled water.