MADISON, Wis. - A researcher from the University of Wisconsin at Madison has created a new method to slice cheese - by using a laser. "At any other university, people would have just laughed. But this is Wisconsin. It's cheese. And this is no laughing matter," said Xiaochun Li, a mechanical engineering professor and laser expert. Li, along with engineering graduate student Hongseok Choi, has discovered that the same kind of laser used for eye surgery can be used to slice Wisconsin's famous food product. Li first tried to use a traditional commercial laser that uses heat to cut by melting or evaporating, but that fried the cheese. Trying again, he used a new class of laser, known as a cold laser, that cuts by blasting apart the molecular bonds that hold materials together.