English

Thermal light in confined dimensions for "laser" cooling with unfiltered sunlight

Quantum Physics 2023-05-19 v1 Atomic Physics

Abstract

Cooling of systems to sub-kelvin temperatures is usually done using either a cold bath of particles or spontaneous photon scattering from a laser field; in either case, cooling is driven by interaction with a well-ordered, cold (i.e. low entropy) system. However, there have recently been several schemes proposed for ``cooling by heating,'' in which raising the temperature of some mode drives the cooling of the desired system faster. We discuss how to cool a trapped ion to its motional ground state using unfiltered sunlight at 5800K5800\,\mathrm{K} to drive the cooling. We show how to treat the statistics of thermal light in a single-mode fiber for delivery to the ion, and show experimentally how the black-body spectrum is strongly modified by being embedded in quasi-one-dimension. Quantitative estimates for the achievable cooling rate with our measured fiber-coupled, low-dimensional sunlight show promise for demonstrating this implementation of cooling by heating.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.11124,
  title  = {Thermal light in confined dimensions for "laser" cooling with unfiltered sunlight},
  author = {Amanda Younes and Wesley C. Campbell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.11124},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

9 pages