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Surfaces of ice act as sites of various chemical reactions of atmospheric acidic gases, which cause serious environmental issues, such as the catalytic ozone depletion by hydrogen chloride (HCl) ga...

A wet cotton rag becomes stiff after natural drying. We propose a model for this hardening phenomenon, which explains that the stiffness of cotton is caused by a cross-linked network between single fibers, mediated by capillary adhesion of bound water on the surface of cellulose. Here, with the aid of atomic force microscopy and atomic force microscopy-infrared spectroscopy, we reveal the existence of the bound water on the surface of a cotton single fiber under naturally dried conditions. We also find that the hydrogen bonding state of the bound water is distinct from that of the bulk water. Two stretching modes of OH groups are clearly decoupled from each other, which arise from the effects of the air-water (hydrophobic) and water-cellulose (hydrophilic) interfaces. This suggests a possible link between the microscopic nature of the bound water and the macroscopic mechanical behavior of cotton fabrics.

Surface melting of ice crystals proceeds below the melting point (0 °C) and forms thin liquid water layers, called quasi-liquid layers (QLLs), which govern a wide variety of phenomena in nature. Hence, many studies have been performed so far; however, the lowest temperature above which QLLs exist on ice crystal surfaces varied from −90 to −1 °C. To reveal the cause of such significant variations, here we show, by laser confocal microscopy combined with Michelson interferometry, the behavior of QLLs on polycrystalline ice thin films that include a large amount of grain boundaries and defects. We found that the QLLs can exist stably on the polycrystalline ice thin films even at −16.2 °C (the lowest temperature adopted in this study), although the QLLs on ice single crystals disappear at temperature lower than −2.4 ± 0.5 °C. These results emphasize the importance of grain boundaries and defects for the presence of QLLs. In addition, we also found that critical water vapor pressure above which the QLLs can gr...

Surfaces of ice have attracted considerable attention as “reaction sites” where atmospheric gases cause various chemical reactions in nature. Hence, revealing the uptake mechanism of atmospheric gases on/in ice remains an experimental challenge. Here we show the direct observation of ice crystal surfaces by advanced optical microscopy in the presence of hydrogen chloride (HCl) gas, which triggers a series of chemical reactions that cause ozone depletion. We found that the HCl gas induced the appearance of droplets of HCl solution on ice crystal surfaces. Under supersaturated water vapor pressure, the HCl droplets were quickly embedded in the ice crystals during the growth of the ice. In contrast, under undersaturated conditions, the embedded HCl droplets reappeared on the ice crystal surfaces during the evaporation of the ice. We estimated that the mole fraction of HCl incorporated into the ice as the HCl droplets (0.19% at −15 °C) was ten times larger than the solubility of HCl gas in an ice crystal (0.0...

We measured the velocity Vstep of isolated elementary spiral steps and the distance Leq between adjacent equivalent spiral steps on ice basal faces by advanced optical microscopy. We determined the step kinetic coefficient β from Vstep measured under various supersaturations. We performed similar experiments under various temperatures T, and determined the temperature dependence of β of ice basal faces, for the first time, in the temperature range of −26.0 to −2.7 °C. When −6.2 ≤ T ≤ −2.7 °C, the value of β decreased significantly with decreasing T. In contrast, when −15.0 ≤ T ≤ −6.2 °C, the value of β increased with decreasing T, and had the maximum at T ≈ −15 °C. When −26.0 ≤ T ≤ −15.0 °C, the value of β decreased monotonically with decreasing T. Such complicated temperature dependence of β strongly implies the existence of unknown phenomena in the temperature range examined. To obtain a clue to the complicated behavior of β, we also measured dependence of Leq on surface supersaturation Δμsurf. When −13...

Surface melting of ice crystals forms quasi-liquid layers (QLLs) on ice surfaces, and affects a wide variety of natural phenomena. Since QLLs enhance various chemical reactions in ice clouds, the formation of QLLs by atmospheric gases has been studied intensively. However, such studies were performed using spectroscopy techniques, which have low spatial resolution. Here we show the first direct visualization of QLLs on ice basal faces in the presence of hydrogen chloride (HCl) gas (model atmospheric gas) by advanced optical microscopy, which can visualize individual 0.37 nm-thick elementary steps on ice crystal surfaces. We found that the HCl gas induced the appearances of QLLs with a droplet shape in the temperature range from −15.0 to −1.5 °C, where no QLL appears in the absence of HCl gas. This result indicates that HCl gas adsorbed on ice crystal surfaces probably changed the surface structure of ice crystals and then induced the subsequent melting of ice surfaces. We also observed the movement, shape...