ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Photomolecular effect: Visible light interaction with air-water interface.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visible light leaves evaporation and interfacial structure of neat water unchanged at the air-water interface.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The Water Behavior Chain: A Unified Framework for Solar Interfacial Evaporation.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Review
- Ultrathin, Unsinkable, Janus-Faced Solar-Thermal Interfacial Evaporator for High-Throughput Seawater Distillation and Solar-Water Production.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Broadband measurement of Feibelman's quantum surface response functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Visualization and quantification of local concentration gradients in evaporating water/glycerol droplets with micrometer resolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reply to Ahmed and Lu: Cluster signals depend on how samples are made and measured.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Absence of water clusters in visible light interactions with the air-water interface.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although water is almost transparent to visible light, we demonstrate that the air-water interface interacts strongly with visible light via what we hypothesize as the photomolecular effect. In this effect, transverse-magnetic polarized photons cleave off water clusters from the air-water interface. We use 14 different experiments to demonstrate the existence of this effect and its dependence on the wavelength, incident angle, and polarization of visible light. We further demonstrate that visible light heats up thin fogs, suggesting that this process can impact weather, climate, and the earth's water cycle and that it provides 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. Our 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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.