Bench-top Cooling of a Microwave Mode using an Optically Pumped Spin Refrigerator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a room-temperature method to temporarily cool a microwave mode by interacting with optically pumped spins in a crystal, potentially enabling low-noise quantum devices without cryogenics.

Contribution

The authors experimentally show microwave mode cooling using optically pumped spins at room temperature, a novel approach for low-noise quantum technologies.

Findings

Microwave noise temperature reduced to ~50 K from room temperature.

System modeled as a maser indicating potential cooling to ~10 K.

Platform is simple, cryogen-free, and suitable for quantum applications.

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the temporary removal of thermal photons from a microwave mode at 1.45 GHz through its interaction with the spin-polarized triplet states of photo-excited pentacene molecules doped within a p-terphenyl crystal at room temperature. The crystal functions electromagnetically as a narrow-band cryogenic load, removing photons from the otherwise room-temperature mode via stimulated absorption. The noise temperature of the microwave mode dropped to $50^{+18}_{-32}$ K (as directly inferred by noise-power measurements) while the metal walls of the cavity enclosing the mode remained at room temperature. Simulations based on the same system's behavior as a maser (which could be characterized more accurately) indicate the possibility of the mode's temperature sinking to $\sim$10 K (corresponding to $\sim$140 microwave photons). These observations, when combined with engineering improvements to deepen the cooling, identify the system as a narrow-band yet extremely convenient platform -- free of cryogenics, vacuum chambers and strong magnets -- for realizing low-noise detectors, quantum memory and quantum-enhanced machines (such as heat engines) based on strong spin-photon coupling and entanglement at microwave frequencies.