There is much ongoing research attempting to elucidate why the material exhibits such dramatic negative thermal expansion.

[citation needed] This phase is thermodynamically unstable at room temperature with respect to the binary oxides ZrO2 and WO3, but may be synthesised by heating stoichiometric quantities of these oxides together and then quenching the material by rapidly cooling it from approximately 900 °C to room temperature.

The ZrO6 octahedra are only slightly distorted from a regular conformation, and all oxygen sites in a given octahedron are related by symmetry.

Work done by C. Verdon and D.C. Dunand in 1997 used similarly sized zirconium tungstate and copper powder in a low carbon steel can coated with Cu, and they were HIPed under 103MPa pressure for 3 hours at 600 °C.

A control experiment was also conducted, with only a heat treatment (i.e., no pressing) for the same powder mixture also under 600 °C for 3 hours in a quartz tube gettered with titanium.

The results from X-ray diffraction (XRD) in the graph in Verdon & Dunand's paper shows expected products.

(a) is from the as received zirconium tungstate powder, (b) is the result from the control experiment , and (c) is the ceramic product from the HIP process.

While complex oxides containing Cu, Zr, and W were believed to be created, selected area diffraction (SAD) of the ceramic product has proven the existence of Cu2O as precipitates after reaction.