Polaritonic chemistry: The influence of mass renormalization

If molecules are placed inside a cavity or near a plasmonic surface strong light-matter interaction can occur that mixes matter and photon degrees of freedom [1]. This can modify properties of molecules [2] and can even alter chemical reactions due to the changed electromagentic vacuum. The theoretical descriptions of such novel chemical situations is usually done with simplified few-level models and only recently more advanced ab-initio methods [4] have been developed and applied [5]. However, so far all these considerations have negelected the influence of the changed electromagentic vacuum on the masses of the particles. That is, while the mass of electrons and nuclei are usually defined with respect to the bare electromagnetic vacuum, in the above cases the electromagentic vacuum is changed considerably. Here we present first ab-initio studies of how multi-mode fields influence the total mass of the particles and thus change physical obervables.

[1] R. J. Thompson, G. Rempe, H. J. Kimble, Phys. Rev. Lett. 68 (1992)
[2] T. W. Ebbesen, Acc. Chem. Res. 49 2403(2016)
[4] M. Ruggenthaler, N. Tancogne-Dejean, J. Flick, H. Appel, A. Rubio, Nat. Rev. Chem. 2, 0118 (2018)
[5] J. Flick, D. M. Welakuh, M. Ruggenthaler, H. Appel, A. Rubio, arXiv:1803.02519