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Flexoelectricity and surface ferroelectricity of water ice

Nature Physics (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Frozen water at ambient pressure—common ice, also known as hexagonal Ih ice—is a non-polar material, even though individual water molecules are polar. Consequently, ice is not piezoelectric and cannot generate electricity under pressure. However, it may in principle generate electricity under bending, because the coupling between polarization and strain gradient (flexoelectricity) is always allowed by symmetry. Here we measure the flexoelectricity of ice and find it to be comparable to that of benchmark electroceramics such as TiO2 and SrTiO3. Moreover, the sensitivity of flexoelectric measurements to surface boundary conditions has revealed a ferroelectric phase transition around 160 K confined within the near-surface region of the ice slabs. Beyond potential applications in low-cost transducers made in situ in cold locations, these findings have profound consequences for our understanding of natural phenomena involving ice: our calculations of the flexoelectric charge density generated in ice–graupel collisions inside thunderstorm clouds compare favourably to the experimental charge transferred in such events, suggesting a possible participation of ice flexoelectricity in the generation of lightning.

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Fig. 1: Experimental set-up for measuring ice flexoelectricity.
Fig. 2: Temperature dependence of the flexoelectricity and mechanical properties of ice.
Fig. 3: Surface contribution to enhanced flexoelectricity.
Fig. 4: Ab initio simulations of interfaces between metal electrodes and 0001-oriented ice.
Fig. 5: Flexoelectricity in ice electrification events.

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Data availability

The data that support this study are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29378186 (ref. 76). Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Liu for her code for processing the experimental data, N. Domingo, D. Pesquera and M. Stengel for useful discussions and P. Vales, J. M. Caicedo, D. Pesquera, S. Ganguly and J. Padilla for technical support. We thank the anonymous referee #5 for suggesting and actually deriving the closed-form expression for contact charge \(Q\), as well as other constructive comments. G.C. acknowledges the support from the National Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación, No. PID2023-148673NB-I00) and from the Catalan AGAUR agency (grant no. 2021-SGR-0129). S.S. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 12090030). ICN2 is funded by the CERCA programme/Generalitat de Catalunya and by the Severo Ochoa Centres of Excellence programme (grant no. CEX2021-001214-S). X.W. acknowledges the support from the China Scholarship Council (grant no. 201906280215), and from the Juan de la Cierva fellowship (grant no. JDC2022-048192-I) funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. M.F.-S. and A.M. were funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under award no. DE-SC0019394, as part of the CCS Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Strength and Vibration of Mechanical Structures, School of Aerospace Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

    X. Wen, Q. Ma & S. Shen

  2. Institut Catala de Nanociencia i Nanotecnologia, CSIC and The Barcelona Institute of Nanoscience and Technology, Campus Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    X. Wen & G. Catalan

  3. Physics and Astronomy Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    A. Mannino & M. Fernandez-Serra

  4. Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    A. Mannino & M. Fernandez-Serra

  5. ICREA—Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Barcelona, Spain

    G. Catalan

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Contributions

G.C. conceived the idea and coordinated this work. G.C. and X.W. designed the experiments. X.W. and Q.M. performed the experiments under the supervision of G.C. and S.S. A.M. and M.F.-S. performed the ab initio calculations and associated data modelling. X.W. performed the calculations and analysis of the electrification section. X.W. and G.C. wrote the manuscript with input from all the other authors. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to X. Wen, S. Shen or G. Catalan.

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Wen, X., Ma, Q., Mannino, A. et al. Flexoelectricity and surface ferroelectricity of water ice. Nat. Phys. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-02995-6

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