On July 9th, 2021, Elastic ice microfibers as the research progress achieved by Professor Tong Limin's team at the State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation was published in SCIENCE. The co-first authors of the paper are doctoral students Xu Peizhen and Cui Bowen from COSE, ZJU. The co-corresponding authors are Prof. Tong Limin and Associate Prof. Guo Xin.
Ice is known to be a rigid and brittle crystal that fractures when deformed. The research team demonstrated 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, the research team could reversibly bend the IMFs up to a maximum strain of 10.9%, which approaches the theoretical elastic limit. They 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 wave guiding and whispering-gallery-mode resonance in their IMFs. The discovery of these flexible ice fibers opens opportunities for exploring ice physics and ice-related technology on micro- and nanometer scales.
Link to the paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6551/187
