Cooling or refrigeration is based on heat removal and dates back thousands of years to when people tried to preserve their food using ice and snow. The laser—a groundbreaking scientific achievement of the 20th century—has revolutionized the cooling process. The advent of lasers brought laser cooling, also known as optical refrigeration, into existence. Today, laser cooling and its applications represent one of the major subfields of atomic, molecular, and solids state physics.
This Field Guide provides an overview of the basic principles of laser cooling of atoms, ions, nanoparticles, and solids, including Doppler cooling, polarization gradient cooling, different sub-recoil schemes of laser cooling, forced evaporation, laser cooing with anti-Stokes fluorescence, hybrid laser cooling, and Raman and Brillouin cooling. It also covers radiation-balanced lasers and Raman lasers with heat mitigation, and considers the basic principles of optical dipole traps, magnetic traps, and magneto-optical traps. This Field Guide will serve both to introduce students, scientists, and engineers to this exciting field, and to provide a quick reference guide for the essential math and science.
I would like to thank SPIE Press Manager Timothy Lamkins and Series Editor John Greivenkamp for the opportunity to write a Fied Guide for one of the most interesting areas of photonics, as well as SPIE Press Sr. Editor Dara Burrows for her help.
This book is dedicated to my mom, Albina.
Galina Nemova
September 2019