Parallel to advances in laser cooling of atoms and ions in dilute gas phase, which has progressed immensely, resulting in physics Nobel prizes in 1997 and 2001, major progress has recently been made in laser cooling of solids. I compare the physical nature of the laser cooling of atoms and ions with that of the laser cooling of solids. I point out all advantages of this new and very promising area of laser physics. Laser cooling of solids (optical refrigeration) at the present time can be largely divided into three areas: laser cooling in ion doped glasses or crystals, laser cooling in semiconductors (bulk or confined, like quantum-well structures), and radiation-balanced lasers. All three areas, which are equally important and promising, are covered in the paper.
Thermal noise usually dominates the low-frequency region of the optical phase noise of soliton microcombs, leading to decoherence and limiting many aspects of applications. In this work, we demonstrate a simple and reliable way to mitigate this noise by laser cooling with the pump laser. The key is rendering the pump laser to simultaneously excite two neighboring cavity modes from different families that are respectively red and blue detuned, one for soliton generation and the other one for laser cooling.
A lightsail can be accelerated to ultra-high speed by the radiation pressure of a laser having an intensity of the order of GW/m$^2$, which though presents a critical challenge in the thermal management of lightsails. In this letter, we explore the applicable regimes of solid-state laser cooling in dissipating heat in additional to the previously explored radiative cooling approach. We begin by examining the cooling capacity of laser cooling, and show that the cooling rate from a micron-thick layer doped with ytterbium ions can exceed that of blackbody thermal emission. This allows more intens…
Solid-state laser cooling of Yb3+-doped KY3F10 to 145 K
Leibniz-Institut für Kristallzüchtung（莱布尼茨晶体生长研究所）；Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB)（弗劳恩霍夫光学系统与技术及图像利用研究所）
Direct laser slab face-cooling by a fluid crossing the main and pump laser beams is an important method to reach high average laser powers. However, the flow regime is usually maintained at low Reynolds numbers, to prevent the onset of turbulence features in the flow, that would degrade wavefront quality. We show here how bringing the fluid temperature to the thermo-optical null point, close to the water/ice transition in the case of water, allows one to mitigate the optical consequences of hydrodynamic instabilities, by bleaching optically the temperature inhomogeneities within the flow. This…
1.1 kW, 100 Hz room-temperature diode-pumped nanosecond laser by water immersion cooling
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；State Key Laboratory of Precision Space-time Information Sensing Technology（精密时空信息传感技术全国重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Photonic Control Technology (Tsinghua University), Ministry of Education（教育部光子控制技术重点实验室（清华大学））
A ytterbium doped silica optical fiber has been cooled by 18.4K below ambient temperature by pumping with 20W of 1035nm light in vacuum. In air, cooling by 3.6K below ambient was observed with the same 20W pump. The temperatures were measured with a thermal imaging camera and differential luminescence thermometry. The cooling efficiency is calculated to be 1.2+-0.1%. The core of the fiber was codoped with Al3+ for an Al to Yb ratio of 6:1, to allow for a larger Yb concentration and enhanced laser cooling.
Laser cooling of solids keeps attracting attention owing to abroad range of its applications that extends from cm-sized all-optical cryocoolers for airborne and space-based applications to cooling on nanoparticles for biological and mesoscopic physics. Laser cooling of nanoparticles is a challenging task. We propose to use Mie resonances to enhance anti-Stokes fluorescence laser cooling in rare-earth (RE) doped nanoparticles made of low-phonon glasses or crystals. As an example, we consider an Yb3+:YAG nanosphere pumped at the long wavelength tail of the Yb3+ absorption spectrum at 1030 nm. We…
We describe a compact and versatile multi-frequency laser system for laser-cooling potassium atoms, by frequency doubling a fiber-optic telecom beam ($\simeq 1534$ or $1540$~nm). Low-power fiber-based telecom lasers and components generate a single beam containing the cooling and repumper half frequencies, subsequently amplified by high-power amplifier. A final free-space SHG stage generates a single beam with typically 2.5 W at quasi-resonant frequencies ($\simeq 767$ or $770$~nm) with high-quality mode and ready for laser cooling. This allowed to trap up to $4\times10^9$ $^{41}$K atoms with …
School of Science and Engineering, Al Akhawayn University（Al Akhawayn大学科学与工程学院）；Ginzton Laboratory and Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University（斯坦福大学电气工程系金斯顿实验室）
Laser cooling of a solid is achieved when a coherent laser illuminates the material, and the heat is extracted by resulting anti-Stokes fluorescence. Over the past year, net solid-state laser cooling was successfully demonstrated for the first time in Yb-doped silica glass in both bulk samples and fibers. Here, we improve the previously published results by one order of magnitude and report more than 6K of cooling below the ambient temperature. This result is the lowest temperature achieved in solid-state laser cooling of silica glass to date to the best of our knowledge. We present details on…
Laser cooling of matter through anti-Stokes photoluminescence, where the emitted frequency of light exceeds that of the impinging laser by virtue of absorption of thermal vibrational energy, has been successfully realized in condensed media, and in particular with rare earth doped systems achieving sub-100K solid state optical refrigeration. Studies suggest that laser cooling in semiconductors has the potential of achieving temperatures down to ~10K and that its direct integration can usher unique high-performance nanostructured semiconductor devices. While laser cooling of nanostructured II-V…
In this article, we explore how cryogenic cooling of the Ti:sapphire laser crystal greatly reduces thermal lensing by over an order of magnitude because of two factors: (i) the increase in the thermal conductivity of the crystal, and (ii) the decrease in the temperature dependence of the refractive index. We obtained analytical expression of the focal length of thermal lens for the pump inside the laser crystal being a Gaussian beam. Through analysis of the laser cavity stability, we found that in order for the relative difference between the optimal laser cavity path lengths in the horizontal…
Measurement-based control has emerged as an important technique to prepare mechanical resonators in pure quantum states for applications in quantum information processing and quantum sensing. Conventionally this has required two separate channels, one for probing the motion and another one acting back on the resonator. In this work, we analyze and experimentally demonstrate a technique of single-laser feedback cooling, where one laser is used for both probing and controlling the mechanical motion. We show using an analytical model and experiments that feedback cooling is feasible in this mode …
Laser cooling of rare-earth doped solids has been demonstrated across a wide range of material platforms, inspiring the development of simple phenomenological models such as the four-level model to elucidate the universal properties of laser cooling under various operating conditions. However, these models usually require the input of full absorption spectra that must be provided experimentally or by additional complicated atomic modeling. In this letter, we propose that a four-level model, when extended to admit effective energy levels adaptive to the pumping photon energy, can accurately pre…
