Cooling through quantum criticality and many-body effects in condensed matter and cold gases

TL;DR

This review explores innovative cooling methods leveraging many-body interactions and quantum criticality in condensed matter and cold gases, highlighting experimental and theoretical advances and their potential applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent many-body cooling techniques and their advantages over traditional methods in condensed matter and cold gases.

Findings

Magnetic cooling schemes based on quantum phase transitions show large magnetocaloric effects.

Many-body cooling techniques like spin-gradient and Pomeranchuk cooling are effective in optical lattices.

New cooling methods outperform conventional approaches in specific quantum systems.

Abstract

This article reviews some recent developments for new cooling technologies in the fields of condensed matter physics and cold gases, both from an experimental and theoretical point of view. The main idea is to make use of distinct many-body interactions of the system to be cooled which can be some cooling stage or the material of interest itself, as is the case in cold gases. For condensed matter systems, we discuss magnetic cooling schemes based on a large magnetocaloric effect as a result of a nearby quantum phase transition and consider effects of geometrical frustration. For ultracold gases, we review many-body cooling techniques, such as spin-gradient and Pomeranchuk cooling, which can be applied in the presence of an optical lattice. We compare the cooling performance of these new techniques with that of conventional approaches and discuss state-of-the-art applications.