They have now further characterized the phase diagram of water at its extremes. Sergey Lobanov is part of the team led by first author Vitali Prakapenka and Nicholas Holtgrewe, both from the University of Chicago, and Alexander Goncharov from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Pressure and temperature span the space for the so-called phase diagram of a substance: Depending on these two parameters, the various manifestations of water and the transitions between solid, gaseous, liquid and hybrid states are recorded here-as they are predicted theoretically or have already been proven in experiments. However, this is only because of very high pressures of several tens of Gigapascal. In planets or in laboratory high-pressure devices, there are different species of ice, type VII or VIII for example, which exist at several hundred or thousand degrees Celsius. Ice is cold at least type I ice from our freezer, snow or from a frozen lake. And they may also help to explain the unusual magnetic fields of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which contain a lot of water. They provide another piece of the puzzle in the spectrum of the manifestations of water. The results were published today in the renowned journal Nature Physics. At the same time, the samples were examined with regard to structure and electrical conductivity. They brought water to extremely high pressures and temperatures in a laser-heated diamond anvil cell. A team of scientists led by Vitali Prakapenka from the University of Chicago, which also includes Sergey Lobanov from the German Research Center for Geosciences GFZ Potsdam, has now measured the structure and properties of two superionic ice phases (ice XVIII and ice XX).