Breaking the low phonon energy barrier for laser cooling in rare-earth doped hosts

A new approach to cool rare earth doped solids with optical super-radiance (SR) is presented. SR is the coherent, sharply directed spontaneous emission of photons by a system excited with a pulsed laser. We consider an Yb3+ doped ZBLAN sample pumped at the wavelength 1015nm with a rectangular pulsed source with a power of similar to 700W and duration of 20ns. The intensity of the SR is proportional to the square of the number of excited ions. This unique feature of SR permits an increase in the rate of the cooling process in comparison with the traditional laser cooling of the rare earth doped solids with anti-Stokes spontaneous incoherent radiation (fluorescence). This scheme overcomes the limitation of using only low phonon energy glasses for laser cooling.