The evaporation of water from light has already become a scientific shock, and now scientists have figured out how best to shine light on water

At the end of 2023, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) literally stunned the scientific world by discovering the phenomenon of water evaporation without heating. For countless centuries, humanity has seen fogs, clouds, haze, etc., which scientists later associated with evaporation processes when water is heated. But it turned out that during evaporation, not only temperature is important, but also the light itself (photons), which is capable of evaporating water and is even more effective than heating. And this turned out to be important.

The other day in a magazine PNAS published an article by researchers from MIT who continued experiments with “photomolecular effect”, as they called the discovered phenomenon. Scientists conducted 14 experiments proving and clarifying a number of aspects of the influence of light on water, during which water molecules were torn off from its surface and turned into steam. For example, last year it was noticed that green light had the most powerful effect on these processes—on the separation of clusters of water molecules from its liquid surface. In new experiments, scientists changed the tilt of illumination and the polarization of light.

Studies have shown that evaporation was strongest when illuminated at an angle of 45°. Polarization also influenced the intensity of evaporation, but this point remains to be clarified. The funny thing is that scientists do not yet fully understand how to explain this phenomenon, in which green light at an angle of 45° begins to be intensively absorbed by water in a vapor state and lead to a noticeable effect of evaporation of liquid water.

Laboratory installations excluded any heat transfer to steam or water, providing lighting with LEDs. However, evaporation when the water was illuminated with light began and continued as long as there was light. In the darkness the phenomenon was absent.

As a matter of fact, climatologists have long been debating the extent to which light is absorbed by the Earth’s cloud masses and the impact of all this on the planet’s climate. The data were inconsistent and showed marked discrepancies between observations and models. With the discovery of the photomolecular effect, everything can fall into place. The models will acquire the missing contours and will correspond to observations, and understanding these processes is not just important, but fundamentally necessary, because the climate agenda with all its consequences is built on this.

Finally, the discovery of heat-free evaporation is the path to new and efficient desalination and drying processes for the production of everything from food to wood, paper and even lithium battery electrodes. Scientists, by the way, have already begun to receive requests for the development of photomolecular dryers from certain industry representatives. So things can quickly pick up steam.