Quantum Physics is Cool! Turning water into ice in the quantum realm

Turning liquid water to ice is a piece of cake in our everyday lives. But, on a quantum scale, it requires much more effort.

Transitions between water and ice are pretty couldn’t be more of an everyday phenomenon in our lives. Especially in scorching hot summer, putting water-filled ice trays into the freezer and pulling out ice-cubes later is frequent, and essential.

So reporting on research that features physicists turning water to ice may not initially sound that exciting. The difference here is, the researchers in question — from the University of Colorado and the University of Toronto — have achieved this familiar transition of state with a cloud of ultracold atoms.

The team discovered that it could nudge these quantum materials to undergo transitions between “dynamical phases” — essentially, jumping between two states in which the atoms behave in completely different ways. The findings are published in a paper in the journal Science Advances.

Study co-author Ana Maria Rey, a fellow at JILA, a joint institute between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), says: “This happens abruptly, and it resembles the phase transitions we see in…