The idea for anti-Stokes cooling was first advanced by Pringsheim in 1929. While Doppler cooling lowers the translational temperature of a sample, anti-Stokes cooling decreases the vibrational or phonon excitation of a medium. This is accomplished by pumping a substance with a laser beam from a low-lying energy state to a higher one with subsequent emission to an even lower-lying energy state. The principal condition for efficient cooling is that the anti-Stokes emission rate to the final state be significantly larger than that to other states as well as the nonradiative relaxation rate. Because vibrational or phonon energy can be many orders of magnitude larger than the energy associated with Doppler broadening, the efficiency of heat removal per laser photon expended for anti-Stokes cooling can be correspondingly larger than that for Doppler cooling. The anti-Stokes cooling effect was first demonstrated by Djeu and Whitney in CO 2 gas. The first anti-Stokes cooling in a solid was demonstrated by Epstein et al. in 1980, in a ytterbium doped fluoride glass sample.