The ultra-elastic, frozen microfibers could teach us more about what happens when ice changes phases. Someday, they may even be used in the coldest places on Earth — or beyond.
a brittle substance
The researchers created the microfibers by cooling down a tungsten needle in a special chamber to about –60 degrees Fahrenheit, Guo says. That’s colder than any other previous experiment of this nature. The team then used an electric field to draw water vapor to the needle tip. As the vapor froze there, it formed a microfiber about 5 micrometers in diameter and about 1 millimeter in length.
The researchers then lowered the temperature even more, to between –94 degrees and –238 degrees Fahrenheit. When they tried to bend it, they found their experiment had worked. The resulting fiber could bend up to a maximum strain of 10.9 percent — much more than regular ice and close to the 15 percent theoretical maximum elasticity of ice, though nobody has ever achieved anywhere close to that. It also bounces back to its original form.
While “cool” in and of itself, bendable ice can also be useful. The researchers sent light through the ice microfiber, which is very clear, and found that it worked just as well as the silica fibers often used to transmit information via light. Guo and Tong believemight also find use in detecting viruses or other microbes; by placing tiny organisms on the microfibers and guiding light through them, we could learn more about the concentration, density or types of microbes that might be present.
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