Quasi-Liquid Layers Can Exist on Polycrystalline Ice Thin Films at a Temperature Significantly Lower than on Ice Single Crystals

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 grow is always higher than the solid–vapor equilibrium curve, indicating that the QLLs are formed in a metastable state by the deposition of supersaturated water vapor.