Uncovering Hidden Complexity in D2O Ice VIII and Ice XV

Water is a crucial chemical compound for living organisms, and twenty different crystal solid forms of water (ices) are known. In a previous experiment we obtained excellent data from PEARL which are already refined for ice VII – manuscript submitted to Nature Commun. Now we keep refining a local structure of ice VI again seeing some new structural phenomena in the local structure of this ice. In this project we would like to study structures of Ice VIII and Ice XV using PDF and RMC methods. These ices can be obtained from the parental Ice VII and Ice VI, respectively, for which we have found interesting new structural effects in their local structures such as, for example, displaced of water moieties in the direction of the polarization vector of each molecule. We also see unexpected asymmetric distribution of atomic positions around the average atomic positions in in the structure of Ice VI. We would like to verify the presence of similar effects in the local structures of the Ice VIII and Ice XV.