Laser cooling of ytterbium-doped silica glass

Mobini E, Rostami S, Peysokhan M, Albrecht A, Kuhn S, Hein S, Hupel C, Nold J, Haarlammert N, Schreiber T, Eberhardt R, Tuennermann A, Sheik-Bahae M, Mafi A (2020)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2020

Journal

Communications Physics Springer Nature

Book Volume: 3

Article Number: 134

Journal Issue: 1

DOI: 10.1038/s42005-020-00401-6

Abstract

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. Here we show the net cooling of high-purity Yb-doped silica glass samples that are fabricated with low impurities to reduce their parasitic background loss for fiber laser applications. 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 Yb-doped silica is calculated.

Involved external institutions

University of New Mexico (UNM) / Universidad de Nuevo México

United States (USA) (US) Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Optik und Feinmechanik (IOF) / Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering

Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Mobini, E., Rostami, S., Peysokhan, M., Albrecht, A., Kuhn, S., Hein, S.,... Mafi, A. (2020). Laser cooling of ytterbium-doped silica glass. Communications Physics, 3(1). https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42005-020-00401-6

MLA:

Mobini, Esmaeil, et al. "Laser cooling of ytterbium-doped silica glass." Communications Physics 3.1 (2020).

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