Origin and Evolution of Ice Percolation

Place a drop of water on an icy surface – it crystallizes at the point of contact, and a slow ice front steadily grows upwards. Place a collection of dew drops, instead – they start 'talking' to each other, freezing in succession, breaking the stochasticity of the nucleation process. The emergent percolation patterns exhibit distinctly different frozen morphologies depending on the nature of wettability of the surface. In this talk, using simple experiments and scaling laws, we will try to explore mechanisms that drive pattern formation and disrupt stochasticity during ice formation – a story that often hides in the metastability of liquid water...