In the no man's land of ice crystals

Simulations allow first insights into the crystallization of tiny water droplets

Water that freezes to ice at some point is everyday physics, but even scientists gain new insights into this phenomenon all the time. For example, it is only now that researchers are able to investigate at nanoscale when this crystallization process starts and how quickly it occurs at different temperatures and water drops of different sizes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, together with colleagues from the George Washington University in Washington, DC and the University of California at Davis, have developed a model that can simulate the formation of ice in tiny water droplets. They found that the crystallization rate is strongly dependent on the radius of very small droplets. Their results could contribute to an improvement of climate models because crystallization of water plays a key role in cloud formation in the upper layers of the atmosphere.