Room-Temperature Superradiance from a Virus Supported Multi-Chromophore Antenna

When a large number of weakly-coupled quantum emitters spontaneously synchronize, unusual collective properties may arise. One example is superradiance - the delayed, accelerated emission from a set of emitters coupling into the same field. This phenomenon was discovered to occur in an array of molecular fluorophores organized within the symmetric confines of an engineered virus protein cage (1,3). Studies of excited-state relaxation with ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy and streak-camera time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy have revealed that following pulsed excitation, emission occurs as a delayed burst lasting few picoseconds, rather than the conventional exponential decay that typically extends over several nanoseconds, from independent chromophores (2). In this talk, we will present the key design principles for creating multi-fluorophore protein cages that exhibit room-temperature super-radiance in solution, along with further mechanistic insights on the role of the relationship between virus structure, mechanical properties, and superradiance.

(1) I.B.Tsvetkova, A.A.Sushma, J. C-Y. Wang, W. L. Schaich, B. Dragnea, ACS Nano, 2019, 13 (10), 11401

(2) J.Holmes, A. A. Sushma, I.B. Tsvetkova, W.L. Schaich, R.D. Schaller, B. Dragnea, J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2022, 13(14), 3237

(3) A.A. Sushma, B. Zhao, I. B. Tsvetkova, C. Perez-Segura, J. A. Hadden-Perilla, J.P. Reily, B. Dragnea, J. Phys. Chem. B, 2021, 125(37), 10494