A research team from the Interdisciplinary Science Research Center, with Professor Sun Changqing as the first author, was invited to publish research findings on the physical mechanisms behind the anomalous properties of ice and water in Physics Reports, a top international journal in physics. Dr. Zhou Yong, also as the first author, published research findings on multiple-field perturbative phonon spectroscopy in Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, a top international journal in the field of colloid chemistry. Dongguan University of Technology is listed as the first affiliated institution for both papers, with Professor Wang Biao serving as the corresponding author.
It is worth noting that Physics Reports invites only distinguished scholars in the field to write comprehensive review articles on significant advances and forward-looking topics. The journal publishes only a single paper per weekly issue, and its impact factor is 30.51. Advances in Colloid and Interface Science has an impact factor of 15.2.
Water is the foundation of survival and the source of all living things, yet all its physical properties are anomalous. The renowned philosopher and humanist Loren Eiseley once remarked that if there is any magic on this planet, it must reside in water. On the occasion of its 125th anniversary, the journal Science listed the structure of water as one of the 125 most challenging questions facing humanity. A recent article in Reviews of Modern Physics also indicated that despite increased resource investment and deepening research efforts, more questions are emerging, cognitive divergence is growing more serious, and debates are becoming increasingly intense. The notion that water is governed by a mystical force still prevails, and several authorities have even asserted that "no one can ever truly understand water."
Building upon the work of previous researchers, the team has transformed their thinking and processing methods, made breakthroughs at the fundamental level, simplified complexity, and separated truth from falsehood, achieving a series of substantial advances. The invited review article in Physics Reports spans nearly 50,000 words and covers the following main aspects: 1) a new theory and scaling rules for the excitation-polarization and cooperative relaxation of three-body coupled hydrogen bonds; 2) new approaches to refining coordinate systems and parameter spaces; 3) novel methods of metrological perturbation spectroscopy; 4) new discoveries including super hydrogen bonds, anti-hydrogen bonds, temperature-induced quasi-solid states, and polarized supersolid states; 5) new breakthroughs in the quantitative and unified explanation of water structure, floating ice, regelation, ice lubrication, ice surface pre-melting, pressure-induced melting, and the rapid cooling of hot water; and 6) new insights into the modes and rates of energy exchange during phase transitions and transport processes. The invited review in Advances in Colloid and Interface Science focuses on the perturbative phonon spectroscopy method to investigate the cooperative relaxation and electron polarization behavior of the segmental length, energy, vibrational frequency, and specific heat function of coupled hydrogen bonds when subjected to external perturbations such as force, temperature, electric fields, and coordination, with the aim of establishing correlations and rules linking the macroscopic measurable properties of ice and water with these microscopic parameters.
Four achievements—pressure-induced hydrogen bond symmetrization, the supersolid state of ice and water skin, ice superlubricity, and the rapid cooling of hot water—have also attracted significant interest from professional media outlets such as Physics World, Physics Today, Chemistry World, Chemistry Views, Nature Chemistry, and New Scientist, which conducted multiple online interviews. The reported findings were subsequently reprinted by more than two hundred news media outlets, including Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph, El Mundo, and China's Cankao Xiaoxi.
This series of groundbreaking and original research practices has not only opened up a new interdisciplinary research direction—generalized coupled hydrogen bond physics and mechanics—that unifies molecular crystals such as ice and water, solutions, and explosives, but has also provided theoretical references and scaling detection methods for the advanced processing of liquid water and the systematic understanding of substances containing lone pair electrons, such as catalytic superconductors and biological processes.
Both of the above research projects were supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
1. CQ Sun, YL Huang, X Zhang, ZS Ma, B Wang, The Physics behind water irregularity, Phys Rep 998, 2023, 0-67. DOI:10.1016/j.physrep.2022.11.001
2. Y Zhou, L Li, YL Huang, JF Ou, W Li, HX Fang, CQ Sun, B Wang, Perturbative vibration of the coupled hydrogen-bond (O:H–O) in water, Adv Colloid Interf Sci 310, 2022, 102809. DOI:10.1016/j.cis.2022.102809
