'Freeze ray' possibility/reality?

[kahlzun]

So, I was thinking in the shower today, and thought of the following:

1: Infrared radiation is integrally related to heat, and can pass heat from one source to another

2: IR is known for being efficient at this, and can potentially be employed as a 'heat ray'

3: Differences in radiation 'types' are based solely around their wavelength and amplitude

4: All 'wave-based' radiation can be annulled or reduced when exposed to opposing wavelengths. (It's been used for visible light also)

5: Therefore, some frequencies of radiation will actively reduce heat

6: Beams of these frequencies would be 'cold'

Have i had a massive brainfart, or am I onto something here?

Or is it not that simple with wave/particle duality in radiation?

[K^2]

There is no "opposite wavelength". You can have destructive interference, but it actually requires similar wavelengths.

There is such thing as laser cooling, however, it has some very significant limitations. Temperature is not so much about energy as it is about entropy, a measure of disorder. If you know precisely the movement of all the particles, a beam of energy can stop such motion and freeze the object. Unfortunately, such information is unattainable. What is possible to do is utilize blue and red shift to make it so that only particles moving at the source absorb radiation from the beam. The recoil from absorbing and then radiating a photon in a random direction will, on average, slow down the particles.

Unfortunately, this only works in a fairly sparse gas and only at select frequencies specific to the gas. A beam that can actually cool down an arbitrary material at normal densities is not feasible.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

There is a kind of freeze ray, but it's actually not a cooling ray. Basically it is possible to cool a liquid below the point where it should normally freeze (called supercooling). It may be possible stabilise a supercooled liquid with microwaves, so when you switch the microwave off it instantly freezes.

[Sirrobert]

There is a kind of freeze ray, but it's actually not a cooling ray. Basically it is possible to cool a liquid below the point where it should normally freeze (called supercooling). It may be possible stabilise a supercooled liquid with microwaves, so when you switch the microwave off it instantly freezes.

I don't think that's how supercooling works.

For a simple example, look at the heat packs

Basicly the liquid inside such a pack is at a temprature below it's freezing point. It doesn't freeze because it doesn't have a 'seed'. Something solid it can freeze against. In normal water and stuf this is simply minerals.

When you click the little plate of metal inside the pack, that becomes the seed, the liquid starts to freeze around it. And in doing this, energy is released. AKA heat

[SZDarkhack]

So, I was thinking in the shower today, and thought of the following:

1: Infrared radiation is integrally related to heat, and can pass heat from one source to another

2: IR is known for being efficient at this, and can potentially be employed as a 'heat ray'

3: Differences in radiation 'types' are based solely around their wavelength and amplitude

4: All 'wave-based' radiation can be annulled or reduced when exposed to opposing wavelengths. (It's been used for visible light also)

5: Therefore, some frequencies of radiation will actively reduce heat

6: Beams of these frequencies would be 'cold'

Have i had a massive brainfart, or am I onto something here?

Or is it not that simple with wave/particle duality in radiation?

Heat is a form of energy, and cooling something down is in essence sucking energy out of it. Radiation of any form carries energy, so hitting an object with any sort of radiation will only increase its energy, not decrease it (excluding various quantum-scale effects, such as laser cooling, that work in a very different way and are inapplicable here, see K^2's post for more details). And interference doesn't really work as simply as you describe unfortunately, so that won't help either :/

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

I don't think that's how supercooling works.

For a simple example, look at the heat packs

Basicly the liquid inside such a pack is at a temprature below it's freezing point. It doesn't freeze because it doesn't have a 'seed'. Something solid it can freeze against. In normal water and stuf this is simply minerals.

When you click the little plate of metal inside the pack, that becomes the seed, the liquid starts to freeze around it. And in doing this, energy is released. AKA heat

Yeah that's kind of what happens, it's just that the microwaves play a major role in supressing nucleation. As I said it doesn't actually cool anything down (in fact due to the latent heat of fusion it releases heat) but it can make stuff freeze on command.

You can also do it with magnets.

[Neelybd]

Well, this wont be a freeze ray, but may have a similar effect to what your looking for. Lets take a spherical object floating in a room without an atmosphere (neglecting conduction and convection). The object is at thermal equilibrium with its surroundings at let say 293K and the conduction of the material is >>> than its size (allows for the use of the Lumped Capacitance Method if you wanted to do this with real numbers and allows for a final object temperature to be determined in this very high level gedanken). Now would introduce a blackbody near the object where the entrance of the blackbody takes us a certain solid angle of the object's view. If the solid angle was 2pi, aka half of the object sees a room at 293K and the other half sees the blackbody, then the object would eventually reach a new equilibrium temperature of 146.5K.