Discovering Ice: Drops, Bubbles, Metastability

Place a drop of water on an icy surface: it crystallizes at the point of contact, and a slow ice front steadily grows upwards. Place a bubble instead, and a burst of ice crystals erupts on the interface, far from where it touches the surface. Now, place a collection of dew drops – they start ‘talking’ to each other, freezing in succession, breaking the stochasticity of the nucleation process. The ordinary freezing of drops and bubbles hides a fascinating array of rich emergent phenomena, far from the ordinary. In this talk, through simple experiments and scaling arguments, we will delve into the nature and origins of these intriguing behaviors, often tied to the metastability of supercooled water. By exploring these phenomena, we will try to gain a deeper insight into the non-classical mechanisms of phase transitions in liquid water – be it in clouds or dew drops on a leaf…