🧊➡️💧 We grow up thinking melting is simple: solid turns into liquid, end of story. But at the atomic scale, reality gets far stranger. Scientists have now captured a hidden intermediate phase—the hexatic phase—inside a two-dimensional layer of silver iodide. It’s a bizarre state that flows like a liquid but still carries the memory of its crystal structure.

Using a graphene “Petri dish,” researchers finally visualized this elusive phase in a covalently bonded 2D crystal—something long believed too difficult to observe. Even more surprising: this 2D material melted at temperatures nearly double its 3D counterpart, reaching ~1200°C! 🔥

Join us as we unpack how real-world melting breaks the rules of classical physics and reveal a new view of one of nature’s most familiar processes.

📄 Source paper: Hexatic phase in covalent two-dimensional silver iodide. Science 2025, Vol 390, Issue 6777, pp. 1033–1037

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