| A laser beam heats a mixture of ethanol and anthocyanins producing the effect of a reciprocating machine. This behaviour is analyzed in terms of the stable, metastable and unstable states of Landau and Lifschitz. Trying first with the van der Waals equation of state, with negative results because the system state is normally far from the critical state, a modified version, with van der Waals coefficients depending linearly on the temperature is proposed, based in the thermodynamic properties of ethanol at room and critical temperatures. The resulting theory allows us to understand the discontinuous results concerning the absorption of the laser beam in terms of a thermodynamic cycle and its frequency dependence on the laser light focus position. Slight changes in the experimental setup may enable the measurement of thermodynamic properties in metastable states. |
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