Just before he went back to India, the paper written by Sandeep Kulangara as first author has been accepted in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The effects of cooperative vibrational strong coupling on the aggregation of two structural isomers of phenyleneethynylene was investigated and showed to lead to two different self-assembled structures, spheres and flakes, having distinct optical properties. These results confirm that VSC can be used to drive molecular assemblies and thereby provide a new tool for supramolecular chemistry.

In addition, Cyriaque Genet just published a perspective on chiral light and chiral matter interactions in ACS Photonics. In this paper, he shows how chiral optical forces shed new light on chiral light−chiral matter interactions. The key advances selected are representative of the vitality of the current research activity and clearly point toward future designs for all-optical chiral separation strategies of high potential.

The left-handed versus right-handed asymmetry of our living world—a “chirality” seen most often in mirror-image architectures of many biomolecules—is one of its most striking features yet one of the most difficult to comprehend. Immersing chiral molecules within chiral environments is an important route to asymmetry, exploited in chemistry for synthesizing and separating chiral molecules according to their handedness. However, the thermodynamics of such a route is not well understood. In a new publication in Physical Review X, we theoretically explore this thermodynamics using a chiral nanoparticle diffusing within a chiral optical light field.

Demonstrating how chiral degrees of freedom can turn into genuine thermodynamics parameters yields a new and rich playground for further exploring chiral light-matter interactions with far-reaching consequences. To that end, we build a stochastic optomechanical model to reveal and control the mechanisms of asymmetry. One central result of our work is to highlight the thermodynamical significance of the coupling between the chirality of the particle and the chirality of the light field.

Our results pave the way to new opportunities in the context of chiral sensing, recognition, and separation of chiral objects at the nanoscale that should now be implemented experimentally and exploited.

Our perspective about chemistry under vibrational strong coupling just appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. We expose the fundamentals of light-matter strong coupling, the recent advancements in vibro-polaritonic chemistry and the numerous perspectives offered by this new approach, that is easy to implement and thus promising for future exploration of light-matter interactions in molecular and material sciences.

A new publication, presenting results obtained in collaboration with National Taiwan Normal University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University just appeared in ACS Photonics. We achieved ultrafast polarization of light by combining the anisotropic optical nonlinear response of ITO at its epsilon-near-zero region with a plasmonic nanoantennas array, at their polarization-sensitive resonance. A rotation of light polarization of more than 30° is obtained together with a π/7 phase change within 600fs. Such a large anisotropic nonlinearity is a significant step towards the realization of ultrafast polarization modulators and phase retarders.

A new publication just appeared in Angewandte Chemie International Edition , in collaboration with IPCMS, Strasbourg, and University of Heidelberg. We studied the self-assembly of a conjugated polymer under vibrational strong coupling. It appeared under electron microcopy that the supramolecular morphology is totally different from that observed in the absence of strong coupling. Morever the self-assembly kinetics is modified and depends on which bond of the solvent is coupled.