Evaporative Cooling of a Photon Fluid to Quantum Degeneracy

Abstract

We demonstrate that the process of evaporative cooling, as associated with the cooling of atomic gases, can also be employed to condense a system of photons giving rise to coherent properties of the light. The system we study consists of photons in a high-quality Fabry-Perot cavity with photon interactions mediated by a nonlinear atomic medium. We predict a macroscopic occupation of the lowest energy mode and evaluate the conditions for realizing a narrow spectral width indicative of a long coherence time for the field.