Right now, the world faces a staggering challenge: more than 2.2 billion people still lack reliable access to safe drinking water, and today’s desalination methods are energy hungry and produce toxic brine that harms marine ecosystems.

University of Rochester Professor of Optics and Physics Chunlei Guo and his team at the U of R’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics have built a solar powered desalination system that uses ultrafast femtosecond laser treated metal panels to evaporate seawater with extraordinary efficiency. The lasers sculpt the surface of the solar panels with tiny bursts of energy so fast they last only a quadrillionth of a second. Those pulses create microscopic structures that pull a thin film of seawater across the panel, where the dark metal absorbs sunlight and instantly evaporates it. As the water turns to vapor, the dissolved salts slide off to the panel’s untreated edges instead of building up, allowing them to be collected cleanly. It’s an elegant system that uses nothing but sunlight and smart surface engineering to turn seawater into fresh water while capturing the leftover minerals. Their paper was published in Nature/Light Science and Applications on May 27, 2026.

Even more exciting, the team has shown that these “super-wicking” panels can be tuned to separate out lithium, offering a clean new pathway to harvest a mineral essential for batteries and global electrification. The technology is still in the research stage, but its promise is enormous: clean water, reduced environmental impact, and even new sources of critical minerals—all powered by sunlight.

In its “Oasis Plan,” the international Schiller Institute, convinced that the sharing and production of fresh water resources remains a key pillar of any durable peace especially between Palestine and Israel, warmly welcomes the potential contributions of this promising new research.