A laser beam that freezes water. It sounds like something that a James Bond or Batman villain might have come up with. However, researchers at the University of Washington now say that such a laser isn’t fiction… it’s reality.

A laser beam that cools things down rather than warms things up seems contradictory.

Since 1960, when the first laser was built by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Laboratories, lasers have almost always been associated with producing heat, but now, that seems to have all changed.

A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last says that a team of researchers at the University of Washington has used an infrared laser to cool liquid water by about 36 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 20 degrees Celsius).

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Dr. Peter Pauzauskie, a University of Washington assistant professor of materials science and engineering, spoke about the discovery.

“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. It was really an open question as to whether this could be done because normally water warms when illuminated.”

So, how did the researchers get the lasers to cool things down instead of heat things up? The scientists aimed a high-heat laser at a tiny crystal suspended in water. The heat was so high that it produced a glow, which then carried heat away from both the crystal and the surrounding water. So far, the laser-refrigeration process is very energy-intensive. As such, the University of Washington scientists have only applied the technique to a single nanocrystal, but they want to improve the laser’s efficiency and continue their experiments.

Okay. So scientists can freeze water with a laser. What implications does that have?

The scientists at the University of Washington say that the laser refrigeration technique could help isolate molecules for more detailed study. It could also help scientists precisely target tiny areas that need cooling, especially in biological research.

Dr. Pauzauskie spoke about how he thought the laser refrigeration technology could be used.

“There’s a lot of interest in how cells divide and how molecules and enzymes function, and it’s never been possible before to refrigerate them to study their properties. Using laser cooling, it may be possible to prepare slow-motion movies of life in action. And the advantage is that you don’t have to cool the entire cell, which could kill it or change its behavior. Few people have thought about how they could use this technology to solve problems because using lasers to refrigerate liquids hasn’t been possible before. We are interested in the ideas other scientists or businesses might have for how this might impact their basic research or bottom line.”

It seems like we’ve gotten extremely used to lasers in the second decade of the 21st Century. Laser pointers are used at practically every University in the country. Laser levelers are commonplace in contractor’s tool belts. There are probably even lasers in the smoke detector in your house! And yet, most of us probably don’t have the slightest idea of how a laser works or even what it is.

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Lasers are distinguished from other light sources by something called coherence. Temporal coherence implies a “polarized wave” at a single frequency whose phase is correlated over a relatively great distance.

Did you understand that? No. It’s fairly complicated. Let’s try again.

Laser stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The difference between “normal” light and a laser, is that a laser is, of course, confined to a single beam, and is only one color. Normal light is made up of a multitude of colors. When normal light hits something, eg. glass, a raindrop, etc., it splits up or scatters. A laser, however, does not.

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