How to Levitate Ice—With Science
Physicists have known how to levitate water for more than 260 years. They just figured out how to levitate ice, too.
The Leidenfrost effect is named for Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, a German physician who described the phenomenon in 1756. He noticed that when he placed a drop of water on a very hot surface, the liquid did not evaporate immediately, as he had expected, but rather skittered around like a whirligig beetle before eventually burning off as steam. Upon investigation, Leidenfrost discovered that a tiny cushion of vapor—about one millimeter thick—had formed beneath the water.
To the group’s surprise, the ice did not levitate at 150 degrees Celsius , the hot-plate temperature that causes water to hover. And it did not levitate when the scientists raised the metal plate’s temperature to 300 degrees C, the upper limit for most Leidenfrost experiments. “These authors went further,” says Felipe Pacheco-Vazquez, a physicist at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Pueblo in Mexico, who was not involved in the study.
The 400-degree-C difference between the temperature required to levitate water and ice was puzzling, especially because it is four times the gap between water’s freezing point and its boiling point . When the team took a closer look, it discovered a layer of meltwater separating the ice puck from the superhot plate. Below the water was a classic Leidenfrost vapor pocket, resulting in all three phases of water stacked on top of one another like a floating parfait.
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