MIT News April 23, 2024
Although water is almost transparent to visible light, researchers at MIT demonstrated that the air–water interface interacts strongly with visible light via what they hypothesized as the photomolecular effect. In this effect, transverse-magnetic polarized photons cleave off water clusters from the air–water interface. They used 14 different experiments to demonstrate the existence of this effect and its dependence on the wavelength, incident angle, and polarization of visible light. They also demonstrated that visible light heats up thin fogs, suggesting that this process could impact weather, climate, and the earth’s water cycle and that it provided a mechanism to resolve the long-standing puzzle of larger measured clouds absorption to solar radiation than theory could predict based on bulk water optical constants. According to the researchers their study suggests that the photomolecular effect should happen widely in nature, from clouds to fogs, ocean to soil surfaces, and plant transpiration and can also lead to applications in energy and clean water… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
…lab device designed to measure the “photomolecular effect,” using laser beams. Credit: MIT