EUROPE: Whether it’s James Bond strapped to a table, Han Solo being cornered by Greedo in the Mos Eisley Cantina, or any other movie scene where lasers are being used as a weapon, the implication is that they do their damage by focusing intense heat on their target.
And so it was in the real world (albeit with less melodrama). Until now, that is. For the first time, scientists have used a laser to cool things down, by figuring out how to make a laser refrigerate water and other types of liquid.
“Typically, when you go to the movies and see Star Wars laser blasters, they heat things up. This is the first example of a laser beam that will refrigerate liquids like water under everyday conditions,” said Peter Pauzauskie, a researcher in materials science and engineering at the University of Washington. “It was really an open question as to whether this could be done because normally water warms when illuminated.”
Pauzauskie and his team used an infrared laser to cool water by about 2.2 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit). Not a huge temperature change by any means, but in light of the fact that it’s never been done before, it’s a major achievement.
Describing their method in the journal PNAS, the team says they effectively ran a laser in reverse, illuminating a microscopic crystal suspended in water so that it glowed with slightly more energy than the amount of light absorbed.
