The Photophysics of Molecular Polaritons in the Collective Regime

Organic molecules interact strongly with confined electromagnetic fields in plasmonic arrays or optical microcavities owing to their bright transition dipole moments. This interaction gives rise to molecular polaritons, hybrid light-matter quasiparticles. Molecular polaritonics opens doors for new room-temperature opportunities for the nontrivial control of physico-chemical properties of molecular assemblies [1]. In this talk, I’ll showcase some of these opportunities that we have been theoretically (and, together with our experimental collaborators) exploring in the past few years. I will briefly discuss the relevant time and energy scales associated with molecular polaritons and strategies to exploit them to control photoexcited processes including singlet fission [2], triplet harvesting [3], remote energy transfer [4-5].<br/> <br/>REFERENCES<br/>[1] R. F. Ribeiro, L. Martínez-Martínez, M. Du, and J. Yuen-Zhou, Polariton chemistry: controlling molecular dynamics with optical cavities, Chem. Sci. 9, 6325-6339 (2018).<br/>[2] L. A. Martínez-Martínez, M. Du, R. F. Ribeiro, S. Kena-Cohen, and J. Yuen-Zhou, Polariton-assisted singlet fission in acene aggregates, J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 9, 1951-1957 (2018) (ACS editor’s choice).<br/>[3] L. A. Martínez-Martínez, E. Eizner, R. F. Ribeiro, S. Kena-Cohen, and J. Yuen-Zhou, J. Chem. Phys. 151, 054106 (2019)<br/>[4] M. Du, L. A. Martínez-Martínez, R. F. Ribeiro, Z. Hu, V. M. Menon, and J. Yuen-Zhou, Theory for polariton assisted remote energy transfer, Chem. Sci. 9, 6659-6669 (2018).<br/>[5] B. Xiang, R.F. Ribeiro, M. Du, L. Chen, Z. Yang, J. Wang, J. Yuen-Zhou, and W. Xiong, Intermolecular vibrational energy transfer enabled by microcavity strong light-matter coupling, Science 368, 6491 (2020). (*)