The morphology of an ice crystal changes from a thin disk, to a perturbed disk and finally to a dendrite with hexagonal symmetry. Since the thickness is very small, ice crystals have been analyzed in two dimensions. Therefore, we carried out in-situ observations of ice crystals growing in supercooled pure water using a new experimental apparatus combined with a MachZehender interferometer. Three-dimensional patterns of ice crystals were analyzed by the interference fringes obtained. The crystal growth process was found to occur in two stages, namely, disk growth and dendritic growth stages. In the first stage, we found that the trajectories of disk growth were categorized in two types, depending on the growth mechanism of basal interfaces. Furthermore we found that the critical factor of morphological instability on the ice disk is not its radius, but its thickness. We also found that the three dimensional pattern of ice is very asymmetric in the direction of the c-axis. In the second stage, the supercooling temperature dependence of growth rates at the dendrite tips is consistent with the universal law of dendritic growth, in which the effects of thermal diffusion and interfacial tension are taken into account, but that of the tip radii is not. These results mean that the effect of interfacial kinetics is intrinsically important to understand the pattern formation mechanism of ice.
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