虽然水对可见光几乎是透明的，但研究人员发现，空气-水界面却能够通过一种假设的光分子效应与可见光产生强烈的相互作用。在这一效应中，横向磁极化光子能够将水团从空气-水界面上剥离出来。为了验证这一效应，研究人员进行了14个不同的实验，成功证实了其存在，并深入探讨了该效应与可见光的波长、入射角以及偏振状态之间的关系。
此外，研究人员进一步证明可见光能够加热薄雾，这表明这一过程可以影响天气、气候和地球的水循环，并且它提供了一种机制来解决长期存在的难题，即测量到的云对太阳辐射的吸收能力，往往大于基于体积水光学常数的理论所能预测的值。这项研究表明，光分子效应在自然界中广泛存在，从云到雾，从海洋到土壤表面，以及植物的蒸腾作用，也可以应用于能源和清洁水资源。
附：英文原文
Title: Photomolecular effect: Visible light interaction with air–water interface
Author: Lv, Guangxin, Tu, Yaodong, Zhang, James H., Chen, Gang
Issue&Volume: 2024-4-23
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.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2320844121
Source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2320844121