Optical Refrigeration for Dramatically Improved Cryogenic Technology

Solid-state refrigerators, which are compact and produce no vibrations, are ideal for many electronics and sensor applications. Currently, the dominant solid-state cooling technology is thermoelectric cooling, which uses the electrical Peltier effect. Despite decades of effort, the lowest achievable temperature for multi-stage thermoelectric coolers (TECs) is around 170 K. ThermoDynamic Films, LLC, together with it collaborators at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will pursue an alternative, approach to solid-state cooling technology, optical refrigeration. To date, the TDF/UNM collaboration has cooled an optical-refrigerator from room temperature to 93 K with about 1% efficiency. This is the world record cooling for optical refrigeration (or any solid-state cooling technology). Under the STTR Phase II contract the TDF/UNM team will create the elements of optical refrigerator necessary to transition this scientific breakthrough to a practical cooling technology. The team will build a prototype optical refrigerator and adapt it to cool silicon monocrystalline optical reference cavities. They will develop and characterize new materials for lower temperature and higher efficiency cooling.