Submission + - Cooling water with Laser Pulses (arxiv.org) 1
k2backhoe writes: Here is an interesting article claiming, counter-intuitively, that hitting pure water with infra-red laser light can cool it. The Russians hypothesize that this particular wavelength excites a thin layer of water on the surface to become excited and bind endothermically with adjacent H2O. This drops the surface temperature by 2K for a few minutes. Before getting too excited about a new kitchen appliance that does for the fridge what the microwave did for the oven, remember this is was also the Russions that gave us polywater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater) in the late 60s.
