Laser cooling of solids

Laser cooling of solids, sometimes also known as optical refrigeration, is a fast developing area of optical science, investigating the interaction of light with condensed matter. Apart from being of fundamental scientific interest, this topic addresses a very important practical issue: design and construction of laser pumped solid-state cryocoolers, which are compact, free from mechanical vibrations, moving parts, fluids and can cause only low electromagnetic interference in the cooled area. The optical cryocooler has a broad area of applications such as in the development of magnetometers for geophysical sensors, in biomedical sensing and can be beneficial for satellite instrumentations and small sensors, where compactness and the lack of vibrations are very important. Simply, a laser cooler works on the conversion of low energy pump photons into high-energy anti-Stokes fluorescence photons by extracting some of the phonons (heat energy) in a material. That is, the process of laser cooling of solids is based on anti-Stokes fluorescence also known as luminescence upconversion, when light quanta in the red tail of the absorption spectrum are absorbed from a pump laser, and blue-shifted photons are spontaneously emitted. The extra energy extracted from the solid-state lattice in the form of the phonons is the quanta of vibrational energy which generates heat. The idea to cool solids with anti-Stokes fluorescence was proposed in 1929 by Peter Pringsheim and first demonstrated experimentally by Epstein's research team in 1995. In 1999, Steven Bowman proposed to use the optical refrigeration by anti-Stokes fluorescence within the laser medium to balance the heat generated by the Stokes shifted stimulated emission in a high-power solid-state bulk laser. Such a laser without internal heating named radiation-balanced or athermal laser was experimentally demonstrated for the first time in 2002. At the present time laser cooling of solids can be largely divided into three main areas: laser cooling of rare-earth doped solids, laser cooling in semiconductors and radiation-balanced lasers. All three areas are very interesting and important and will be considered in this paper.