Overcoming temperature limits in the optical cooling of solids using light-dressed states

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel optical cooling method for solids that uses light-dressed states in defects like diamond color centers to surpass current temperature limits, enhancing cooling efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical approach leveraging dressed states in defect centers to extend phonon transitions and improve solid-state laser cooling performance.

Findings

Theoretical demonstration for silicon-vacancy centers.

Enhanced cooling power via tunable dressed states.

Reduced inhomogeneous broadening effects.

Abstract

Laser cooling of solids currently has a temperature floor of 50 - 100 K. We propose a method that could overcome this using defects, such as diamond color centers, with narrow electronic manifolds and bright optical transitions. It exploits the dressed states formed in strong fields which extend the set of phonon transitions and have tunable energies. This allows an enhancement of the cooling power and diminishes the effect of inhomogeneous broadening. We demonstrate these effects theoretically for the silicon-vacancy and the germanium-vacancy, and discuss the role of background absorption, phonon-assisted emission, and non-radiative decay.