Smallest piece of ice
- Who
- Roger Miller, Klaus Nauta
- Where
- United States (Chapel Hill,)
- When
- 11 November 1998
The smallest piece of ice was created by Roger Miller and Klaas Nauta of the University of North Carolina in 1999. Consisting of just six water molecules arranged in a hexagon, the ice crystal is the smallest theoretically possible, as a minimum of six molecules are required for the formation of ice. For comparison, the average drop of water contains around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water.
The research was published in Science Vol. 287, pp. 293-295, 2000, and was accepted on 11 November 1999.