Laser cooling of CdS nanobelts: thickness matters

We report on the thickness dependent laser cooling in CdS nanobelts pumped by a 532 nm green laser. The lowest achievable cooling temperature is found to strongly depend on thickness. No net cooling can be achieved in nanobelts with a thickness below 65 nm due to nearly zero absorption and larger surface nonradiative recombination. While for nanobelts thicker than ~120 nm, the reabsorption effect leads to the reduction of the cooling temperature. Based on the thickness dependent photoconductivity gain, mean emission energy and external quantum efficiency, the modeling of the normalized temperature change suggests a good agreement with the experimental results.