 The bridge breaks into droplets due to capillary action when the beakers are pulled apart at a critical distance, or the voltage is reduced to a critical value.The bridge needs clean, deionized water to be formed, and its stability is dramatically reduced as ions are introduced into the liquid (by either adding salt or from electrochemical reactions at the electrode surface).Although the phenomenon still needs to be studied further, the scientific community agrees that surface polarization at the water surface when a high tangent electrical field is applied is responsible for the extraordinary stability of the system, which has been confirmed via experiments, theory and simulations.