Quick Shot

On 5 February, the New York Times Science section posted an article that features an experiment that was conducted at the Omega Laser Facility under the LLE Laboratory Basic Science Program and was recently published in the journal Nature Physics. The paper discusses a new “strange” form of water that is simultaneously solid and liquid. The paper highlights experiments conducted by a team comprised of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Rochester and led by Marius Millot, a physicist at LLNL. This new form of water is called “superionic water” and is not known to exist naturally on Earth. Scientists created it by squeezing water between two pieces of diamond to create a type of ice that is about 60% denser than usual. Then, on the OMEGA Laser System, a pulse of laser light was used to heat the ice to thousands of degrees to exert a pressure more than a million times that of Earth’s atmosphere. These conditions exist inside Uranus and Neptune and undoubtedly within numerous ice giants around other stars. A solicitation for proposals for the FY19 Laboratory Basic Science Program is currently underway.