Laser Cooling of Nuclear Magnons.

Abstract

The initialization of nuclear spin to its ground state is challenging due to its small energy scale compared with thermal energy, even at cryogenic temperature. In this Letter, we propose an optonuclear quadrupolar effect, whereby two-color optical photons can efficiently interact with nuclear spins. Leveraging such an optical interface, we demonstrate that nuclear magnons, the collective excitations of nuclear spin ensemble, can be cooled down optically. Under feasible experimental conditions, laser cooling can suppress the population and entropy of nuclear magnons by more than 2 orders of magnitude, which could facilitate the application of nuclear spins in quantum information science.