Yes. A laser can cool a specially prepared solid when the material emits fluorescence photons that carry away more energy than the pump photons delivered. In 2006, researchers reported this effect in laboratory erbium-doped crystal and glass samples—not in ordinary erbium metal, a consumer device, or a commercial refrigerator.
How can shining a laser make something colder?
The mechanism is called anti-Stokes laser cooling. The pump laser is tuned to the red side of a material’s absorption feature, where each absorbed photon has slightly less energy than a photon emitted from the excited material. If the excited ion then emits a higher-energy photon and that light escapes, the difference must come from somewhere: it is taken from the solid’s thermal energy.
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In a solid, atoms and ions vibrate. Those vibrations are described as phonons. During anti-Stokes fluorescence, the material can absorb a lower-energy pump photon while drawing additional energy from these thermal vibrations; the escaping fluorescence photon carries both away. The laser does not create cold. Cooling is the result of this energy leaving the sample as light. This is the basic energy accounting described in the review “Condensed-phase optical refrigeration” and the 2026 methods primer on solid-state laser cooling.
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Why the glow alone is not enough
Net cooling is conditional. The sample must convert absorbed pump energy into escaping fluorescence efficiently. Parasitic absorption can turn laser or fluorescence light into heat, and nonradiative transitions can return excitation energy to the material without emitting a photon. If those losses outweigh the energy carried away by fluorescence, the sample warms rather than cools. A bright glow by itself therefore does not demonstrate refrigeration.
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What the 2006 erbium study showed
Joaquin Fernandez, Angel J. Garcia-Adeva, and Rolindes Balda reported the first observation of anti-Stokes laser-induced cooling in an erbium-doped crystal and glass in their 2006 Physical Review Letters paper, “Anti-Stokes Laser Cooling in Bulk Erbium-Doped Materials.” They calculated internal cooling efficiencies using photothermal deflection spectroscopy and used infrared thermal scans as evidence of the samples’ bulk-cooling capability.
The journal’s displayed abstract confirms the crystal-and-glass result and measurement methods but omits the chemical formulas. The associated 2006 preprint record identifies the samples as Er3+:KPb2Cl5 crystal and Er3+:CNBZn glass. These are erbium-doped host materials prepared for a laboratory experiment; the finding should not be generalized to a piece of erbium metal or to an off-the-shelf laser or cooling product.
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What the paper does not establish numerically
The journal abstract does not state a temperature drop, pump wavelength, or cooling power. Those figures should not be inferred from other laser-cooling experiments. In particular, the 21 K result reported for an older ytterbium-doped glass is not an erbium result. Nor are cryogenic records in ytterbium-doped yttrium lithium fluoride (Yb:YLF) demonstrations of erbium cooling.
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A reported temperature change is more convincing when the measurement rules out heating and artifacts and shows that the material’s behavior is thermodynamically consistent. The 2025 expert guidance, “Principles for demonstrating condensed-phase optical refrigeration,” recommends reporting cooling metrics, explicitly examining heating-versus-cooling behavior, checking thermodynamic consistency, and using reliable thermometry. A 2026 methods primer likewise emphasizes consistent reporting of material characteristics, cooling metrics, and temperature measurement.
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For a research result, the useful questions are whether the sample’s temperature is measured reliably, whether parasitic heating is accounted for, and whether the cooling behavior is documented rather than inferred from fluorescence brightness alone. The 2006 erbium report’s photothermal-deflection efficiency measurements and infrared thermal scans are the relevant methods described in its abstract; the abstract does not provide a numerical temperature drop.
How later milestones relate to erbium
Later field figures need their material and evidence status attached. A 2026 Physical Review Research paper reports 87 K as a demonstrated minimum for rare-earth-ion-doped crystals, a broad category rather than an erbium-specific result. The same paper models an approximately 38 K minimum internal temperature for a Yb:YLF nanocrystal near an optical cavity under realistic conditions; that is a theoretical prediction, not a measured temperature and not an erbium demonstration. See “Purcell-enhanced optical refrigeration.”
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Those milestones show that optical refrigeration is an active research area, but they do not supply a missing temperature figure for the 2006 erbium samples. The evidence supports the specific claim that anti-Stokes cooling was observed in erbium-doped crystal and glass under laboratory conditions—not a broader claim that erbium is a practical refrigerator.
What researchers compare when evaluating cooling materials
There is no consumer product choice implied by this experiment. In research, candidate materials are assessed by factors such as host and dopant, fluorescence quantum efficiency, parasitic absorption, pump wavelength, operating temperature range, and whether a reported result was measured or modeled. The sources discussed here do not establish a basis for ranking the erbium crystal and glass hosts against each other.
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