Laser cooling in a silica optical fiber at atmospheric pressure

For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, laser cooling is reported in a silica optical fiber. The fiber has a 21-μm diameter core doped with 2.06 wt.% YbM³⁺ and co-doped with Al2O3 and F- to increase the critical quenching concentration by a factor of 16 over the largest reported values for the Yb-doped silica. Using a custom slow-light fiber Bragg grating sensor, temperature changes up to -50 mK were measured with 0.33 W/m of absorbed pump power per unit length at 1040 nm. The measured dependencies of the temperature change on the pump power and the pump wavelength are in excellent agreement with predictions from an existing model, and they reflect the fiber's groundbreaking quality for the radiation-balanced fiber lasers.