Building a refrigerator based on the conversion of heat into optical energyis an ongoing engineering challenge. Under well-defined conditions, spontaneousanti-Stokes fluorescence of a dopant material in a host matrix is capable oflowering the host temperature. The fluorescence is conveying away a part of thethermal energy stored in the vibrational oscillations of the host lattice. Inparticular, applying this principle to the cooling of (solid-state) lasersopens up many potential device applications, especially in the domain ofhigh-power lasers. In this paper, an alternative optical cooling scheme isoutlined, leading to radiative cooling of solid-state lasers. It is based onconverting the thermal energy stored in the host, into optical energy by meansof a stimulated nonlinear process, rather than a spontaneous process. Thisshould lead to better cooling efficiencies and a higher potential of applyingthe principle for device applications.
展开▼
