Abstract

Evaporative cooling of volatile liquids is a well known phenomenon. In the case of liquid drops, however, the theoretically predicted temperature has never been observed. This discrepancy arises due to heat conduction along the thermocouple which is used to suspend the drops and measure their temperature^[1,2]. As a remedy to this situation, we have developed a fluorescence based method that remotely measures the temperature of levitated water drops. Application of this method to individual drops of water provides drop temperatures which agree with those predicted by theory.

© 1990 Optical Society of America