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A near-minimal instance of optical cooling is experimentally presented, wherein the internal-state entropy of a single atom is reduced more than twofold by illuminating it with broadband, incoherent light. Since the rate of optical pumping by a thermal state increases monotonically with its temperature, the cooling power in this scenario increases with higher thermal occupation, an example of a phenomenon known as cooling by heating. In contrast to optical pumping using coherent, narrow-band laser light, here, we perform the same task with fiber-coupled, broadband sunlight, the brightest laboratory-accessible source of continuous blackbody radiation.
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Photoluminescent cooling with incoherent light
Optical refrigeration using anti-Stokes photoluminescence is now well established, especially for rare-earth-doped solids where cooling to cryogenic temperatures has recently been achieved. The cooling efficiency of optical refrigeration is constrained by the requirement that the increase in the entropy of the photon field must be greater than the decrease in the entropy of the sample. Laser radiation has been used in all demonstrated cases of optical refrigeration with the intention of minimizing the entropy of the absorbed photons. Here, we show that as long as the incident radiation is unidirectional, the loss of coherence does not significantly affect the cooling efficiency. Using a general formulation of radiation entropy as the von Neumann entropy of the photon field, we show how the cooling efficiency depends on the properties of the light source, such as wavelength, coherence, and directionality. Our results suggest that the laws of thermodynamics permit optical cooling of materials with incoherent sources, such as light emitting diodes and filtered sunlight, almost as efficiently as with lasers. Our findings have significant and immediate implications for design of compact all-solid-state devices cooled via optical refrigeration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1952841
- PAR ID:
- 10612614
- Publisher / Repository:
- AIP
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- APL Photonics
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2378-0967
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0217272
