Date and Time
Location
Abstract
Water may seem like the most mundane of all liquids, even though it is absolutely crucial to our existence on Earth, but physically it is a very strange substance. For example, the fact that water is heaviest at 4 degrees Celsius prevents lakes from freezing to the bottom, protecting marine life during cold winters. There has been speculation for many decades about several different theories to explain why the strange properties are so greatly enhanced when water is supercooled. Now, with the help of the X-ray laser in Korea, we have found that there is a critical point that creates fluctuations in a large temperature range and is the reason why water has strange properties even at our temperature and pressure conditions1.
1 Science 391, 1387 (2026)
The image depicting laser-induced change from two distinct liquid states, high-density liquid and low-density liquid, to a single liquid phase via the critical point and probed with the x-ray laser.