| Abstract |
The phase transition of ice plays crucially important roles in various phenomena in nature because of its abundance on earth and also in space. Hence, molecular-level understanding of ice crystal surfaces holds the key to unlocking the secrets of a number of fields. In this talk, we demonstrate, by our advanced optical microscopy, that elementary steps (the growing ends of ubiquitous molecular layer with the minimum height) of ice crystals and their dynamic behavior can be visualized directly at air-ice interfaces. We also succeeded in visualizing surface melting process of ice, for the first time, by our optical microcopy. Then we found that two types of quasi-liquid layer phases appear that exhibit different morphologies and dynamics. |
