Purcell-enhanced optical refrigeration

Abstract

Optical refrigeration of solids with anti-Stokes fluorescence has been widely explored as a vibration-free cryogenic cooling technology. A minimum temperature of 87 K has been demonstrated with rare-earth ion doped crystals using optical refrigeration. However, the depletion of the upper-lying energy levels in the ground state manifold hinders further cooling to below the liquid nitrogen (LN$_2$) temperatures, restricting its applications. In this work, we introduce a Purcell-enhanced optical refrigeration method to circumvent this limitation. This approach enhances the emission of high-energy photons by coupling the emitters to an optical cavity, blue shifting the mean emission wavelength. Such Purcell-enhanced emission facilitates cooling starting from a lower energy level in the ground state manifold, which exhibits a higher occupation below the LN$_2$ temperatures. Using experimentally measured optical coefficients, our theoretical analysis predicts a minimum achievable internal temperature of about 38 K for a Yb$^{3+}$:YLiF$_{4}$ nanocrystal near a cavity under realistic conditions. The proposed method is applicable to other rare-earth ion doped materials and semiconductors, and will have applications in creating superconducting and other quantum devices through solid-state cooling.