Dynamic pressure-induced dendritic and shock crystal growth of ice VI.

Crystal growth mechanisms are crucial to understanding the complexity of crystal morphologies in nature and advanced technological materials, such as the faceting and dendrites found in snowflakes and the microstructure and associated strength properties of structural and icy planetary materials. In this article, we present observations of pressure-induced ice VI crystal growth, which have been predicted theoretically, but had never been observed experimentally to our knowledge. Under modulated pressure conditions in a dynamic-diamond anvil cell, rough single ice VI crystal initially grows into well defined octahedral crystal facets. However, as the compression rate increases, the crystal surface dramatically changes from rough to facet, and from convex to concave because of a surface instability, and thereby the growth rate suddenly increases by an order of magnitude. Depending on the compression rate, this discontinuous jump in crystal growth rate or "shock crystal growth" eventually produces 2D carpet-type fractal morphology, and moreover dendrites form under sinusoidal compression, whose crystal morphologies are remarkably similar to those predicted in theoretical simulations under a temperature gradient field. The observed strong dependence of the growth mechanism on compression rate, therefore, suggests a different approach to developing a comprehensive understanding of crystal growth dynamics.