They have very different applications. Laser cooling has extremely low cooling power but can reach low temperatures. It’s good for cooling a gas of atoms or even individually trapped atoms.
A dilution refrigerator, as are used in superconducting quantum computing and other low temperature condensed matter experiments, could cool a sandwich. We’re talking maybe a milliwatt of cooling power. Electronic cooling — I don’t know.
Based on the wikipedia article, macroscopic laser cooling is largely used for cooling gases.
Insofar as I'm aware, laser cooling is always used as the final stage of gas cooling, on top of more standard methods, because there are more efficient methods to go from e.g. room temperature to cryogenic temperatures, and cryogenic to near-absolute-zero temperatures and so on. The method in the article, as I understand it, is meant specifically to address the cooling that's typically done with e.g. liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, not necessarily what's done below Helium-4's condensation temperature. The article is definitely too vague to know if thermionic cooling addresses a Helium-3 stage or not.
> In the experiments, the team created a superfluid helium film on a silicon chip.
> They then used a bright laser beam to draw energy out of waves on the surface of the superfluid, cooling them.
> In addition to laser cooling, the research team showed that combining superfluid with microphotonics allows extremely precise measurements of superfluid waves
Additionally, FWIU there are now inexpensive integrated lasers from which a laser cooling array could be built to enclose a QC sim
It would be interesting if it were used to cool laser sails, which might enable very high power levels for interstellar travel. This of course is not currently possible for multiple reasons.
Laser cooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling