What is the efficiency of laser cooling vs other methods? askscience

The sort of scenario that I'm thinking of is:

If you had a refrigerator who's goal is to cool it's contents to some moderate temperature, say 5 degrees celsius, how much energy would it take some theoretical laser cooling system vs your average compressor based fridge.

Maybe the laser is cooling some matter that has a coolant being circulated through it or something. I imagine that's not practical, and that there are many theoretical and practical problems with it, and I'd love for you to tell me what those problems are, but I'm just trying to get an idea of "energy per degree cooled" if that makes sense.

Thanks!

Submitted December 01, 2015 at 10:34AM by farming_diocletian http://ift.tt/1QQWKmw askscience