Theory of Vibronic Polaritons in Optical Microcavities

The interaction of organic molecules and molecular aggregates with electromagnetic fields that are strongly confined inside optical cavities within nanoscale volumes, has allowed the observation of exotic quantum regimes of light-matter interaction at room
temperature for a wide variety of cavity materials and geometries. In this talk, a new theoretical framework is presented that can successfully describe organic cavities under strong light-matter coupling.[1,2] The theory combines standard concepts in chemical physics
and quantum optics to provide a microscopic description of vibronic organic polaritons that is fully consistent with available experiments, and yet is profoundly different from the common view of organic polaritons. A new class of "dark" vibronic polaritons is introduced in which the photonic component is dressed by intramolecular vibrations. Dark polaritons allow consistent solutions to some of the long-standing puzzles in the interpretation of organic cavity photoluminescence.[3.4]

1. F. Herrera and F. C. Spano, Dark vibronic polaritons and the spectroscopy of organic microcavities, Physical Review Letters 118 (22), 6
(2017).
2. F. Herrera, Spano F.C., Theory of nanoscale organic cavities: The essential role of vibration-photon dressed states, ACS Photonics (in press) (2017).
3. P. A. Hobson, W. L. Barnes, D. G. Lidzey, G. A. Gehring, D. M. Whittaker, M. S. Skolnick and S. Walker, Strong exciton-photon coupling in a low-q all-metal mirror microcavity, Appl. Phys. Lett. 81 (19), 3519-3521 (2002).
4. T. Schwartz, J. A. Hutchison, J. Leonard, C. Genet, S. Haacke and T. W. Ebbesen, Polariton dynamics under strong light-molecule coupling, ChemPhysChem 14 (1), 125-131 (2013).