So, in fact, water will evaporate without heat because of the lack of equilibrium between air and water, until the air is wet enough for the process to stop.

Discovering that light vaporise water is not the same as discovering that water vaporise itself without heat. It is an interesting discovery nonetheless.

It’s still silly.

That’s literally not possible. It may be heat that we don’t have sensitive enough equipment to detect but light is energy and it hitting the water will release heat.

They explain that in the article. Light barely gets absorbed in water, which is why you can see several meters deep in water. Only the absorbed part can turn into heat.

They measured an effect that partly evaporates water more efficiently than the heat influx can. The theory mentioned in the article is, that light directly knocks out water molecules at the water/air surface boundary. The measured effect was the most effective with light of a green wavelength

Heat doesn’t really exist at an individual particle level, it only describes the average kinetic energy of a large number of particles. “Normal” evaporation occurs because all the water molecules are jiggling around fast enough that sometimes some get knocked off at the top and fly away. The theory from this paper says that light can strike a single water molecule just right that it breaks off without help from the others.

Saying this is “without heat” means that the light isn’t simply increasing the average kinetic energy at the top of the water and speeding up the rate of “normal” evaporation. They think it’s specifically acting on a single molecule at a time.