Elastic ice microfibers

Peizhen Xu; Bowen Cui; Yeqiang Bu; Hongtao Wang; Xin Guo; Pan Wang; Y Ron Shen; Limin Tong

doi:10.1126/science.abh3754

Elastic ice microfibers

Science. 2021 Jul 9;373(6551):187-192. doi: 10.1126/science.abh3754.

Authors

Peizhen Xu^#¹, Bowen Cui^#¹, Yeqiang Bu², Hongtao Wang², Xin Guo³, Pan Wang¹, Y Ron Shen⁴, Limin Tong^{3

5}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
² Center for X-Mechanics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. guoxin@zju.edu.cn phytong@zju.edu.cn.
⁴ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁵ Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 34244408
DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3754

Abstract

Ice is known to be a rigid and brittle crystal that fractures when deformed. We demonstrate that ice grown as single-crystal ice microfibers (IMFs) with diameters ranging from 10 micrometers to less than 800 nanometers is highly elastic. Under cryotemperature, we could reversibly bend the IMFs up to a maximum strain of 10.9%, which approaches the theoretical elastic limit. We also observed a pressure-induced phase transition of ice from Ih to II on the compressive side of sharply bent IMFs. The high optical quality allows for low-loss optical waveguiding and whispering-gallery-mode resonance in our IMFs. The discovery of these flexible ice fibers opens opportunities for exploring ice physics and ice-related technology on micro- and nanometer scales.