Laser cooling.

Laser Cooling of Semiconductors

Optical irradiation accompanied by spontaneous anti-Stokes emission can lead to cooling of matter, a phenomenon known as laser cooling or optical refrigeration proposed in 1929 by Peter Pringsheim. In solid state materials, the cooling is achieved by annihilation of lattice vibrations (i.e., phonons). Since the first experimental demonstration in rare-earth doped glasses, considerable progress ...

Laser cooling of atoms

The concept of radiation-pressure cooling of atoms was independently suggested in 1975 for the case of a gas of neutral atoms by Hänsch and Schawlow, and for atomic ions bound in an electromagnetic trap by Wineland and Dehmelt. While the notion that momentum exchange from a photon moving in the opposite direction could slow an individual atom was well understood, until this time no one had come...

Transient laser cooling.

Superfast laser cooling.

Currently, laser cooling schemes are fundamentally based on the weak coupling regime. This requirement sets the trap frequency as an upper bound to the cooling rate. In this work we present a numerical study that shows the feasibility of cooling in the strong-coupling regime which then allows cooling rates that are faster than the trap frequency with experimentally feasible parameters. The sche...

Laser cooling in semiconductors

The recent advances in the development and fabrication of semiconductor lasers have stimulated growing interest in semiconductors as candidates for optical cooling. The essential difference between semiconductors and rare-earth (RE) doped materials is in their cooling cycles. In the case of RE-doped glasses or crystals, the cooling transition occurs in localized donor ions within the host. In t...