Laser Cooling of Silica Glass

Laser cooling of a solid is achieved when a coherent laser illuminates the material in the red tail of its absorption spectrum, and the heat is carried out by anti-Stokes fluorescence of the blue-shifted photons. Solid-state laser cooling has been successfully demonstrated in several materials, incl...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2019-10
Main Authors: Mobini, Esmaeil, Rostami, Saeid, Peysokhan, Mostafa, Albrecht, Alexander, Kuhn, Stefan, Hein, Sigrun, Hupel, Christian, Nold, Johannes, Haarlammert, Nicoletta, Schreiber, Thomas, Eberhardt, Ramona, Tunnermann, Andreas, Sheik-Bahae, Mansoor, Mafi, Arash
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Absorption spectra
Background radiation
Cooling
Cryogenic cooling
Data processing
Decay rate
Doped crystals
Efficiency
Fiber lasers
Fluorescence
Glass lasers
Gravitational waves
Impurities
Laser applications
Laser beam heating
Laser cooling
Lasers
Low level
Optical materials
Quantum efficiency
Quantum phenomena
Rare earth elements
Silica glass
Silicon dioxide
Solid state lasers
Substrates
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Laser cooling of a solid is achieved when a coherent laser illuminates the material in the red tail of its absorption spectrum, and the heat is carried out by anti-Stokes fluorescence of the blue-shifted photons. Solid-state laser cooling has been successfully demonstrated in several materials, including rare-earth-doped crystals and glasses. Silica glass, being the most widely used optical material, has so far evaded all laser cooling attempts. In addition to its fundamental importance, many potential applications can be conceived for anti-Stokes fluorescence cooling of silica. These potential applications range from the substrate cooling of optical circuits for quantum information processing and cryogenic cooling of mirrors in high-sensitivity interferometers for gravitational wave detection to the heating reduction in high-power fiber lasers and amplifiers. Here we report the net cooling of high-purity Yb-doped silica glass samples that are primarily developed for high-power fiber laser applications, where special care has been taken in the fabrication process to reduce their impurities and lower their parasitic background loss. The non-radiative decay rate of the excited state in Yb ions is very small in these glasses due to the low level of impurities, resulting in near-unity quantum efficiency. We report the measurement of the cooling efficiency as a function of the laser wavelength, from which the quantum efficiency of the silica glass is calculated.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1910.10609