A design for optical refrigeration: The parallel configuration

For optical refrigeration to become a viable option for cryogenics, it is fundamental to improve the overall cooling power of an optical cryocooler. In this paper, we propose a design that might be able to cool down a thermal load to temperatures lower than ever before: the parallel configuration. We explore the possibility of attaching a thermal load to multiple Yb:YLF monocrystals, which would allow us to use more pump intensity without surpassing the saturation limit, and we show that by using two YLF:5% Yb crystals connected to an undoped YLF sample (that acts both as a thermal link and a thermal load) we obtained a ΔT increase in 40% compared to a setup with the load and a single crystal.