Radiative cooling of bulk silicon by incoherent light pump

In contrast to radiative cooling by light up conversion caused exclusively by a low-entropy laser pump and employing thermally assisted fluorescence/luminescence as a power out, we demonstrate light down conversion cooling by incoherent pumps, 0.47–0.94 μm light emitting diodes, and employing thermal emission (TE) as a power out. We demonstrate ≤3.5 K bulk cooling of Si at 450 K because overall energy of multiple below bandgap TE photons exceeds the energy of a single above bandgap pump photon. We show that using large entropy TE as power out helps avoid careful tuning of an incoherent pump wavelength and cool indirect-bandgap semiconductors.