“Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat.”
Hydrogel experiments kept evaporating water at double or triple the thermal limit, and researchers were puzzled. MIT’s Yaodong Tu and Gang Chen tested another group’s sample, got the same impossible numbers, and blamed photons knocking water clusters off the surface. If it holds, climate models are missing a piece of how fog and clouds form. Solar desalination gets a route that skips turning sunlight into heat first.