Brillouin–Mandelstam scattering-based cooling of traveling acoustic waves from cryogenic temperatures

Thermal phonons are a major source of decoherence in quantum mechanical systems. Operating in the quantum ground state is therefore often an experimental prerequisite. Additionally, to passive cooling in a cryogenic environment, active laser cooling enables the reduction of phonons at specific acoustic frequencies. Brillouin cooling has been used to show efficient reduction of the thermal phonon population in waveguides at GHz frequencies down to 74 K. In this Letter, we demonstrate the cooling of a 7.608 GHz acoustic mode by combining Brillouin active cooling with precooling from 77 K using liquid nitrogen. We show a 69% reduction in the phonon population, resulting in a final temperature of 24.3 ± 1.9 K, 50 K lower than previously reported.