Here is a new paper accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, where we demonstrate that a molecular vibration can be ultra-strongly coupled to multiple infra-red cavity modes, with Rabi splittings reaching 24% of the vibration frequencies. This effect induces a whole vibrational ladder of heavy polaritonic states perfectly resolved. The vibrational ultra-strong coupling regime,  which impact both the optical and the molecular properties of the coupled systems, thus offers promising possibilities in particular in the context of mode-selective chemistry. For now, you can read our work on arXiv and also download it from our publications page.

A little improvement of our publications section has started today : you can now directly download the pdf versions of our most recent papers. We will progressively add the older ones in the coming weeks.

* a little bit of reading, that cannot hurt… title of a nice radio show on the french radio France Inter

A fruitful collaboration between our group and Josef Moran team at ISIS revealed another very promising aspect of strong coupling : we proved indeed that one can modify a chemical reaction by strongly coupling a vibrational mode of the reactant. The reaction slows down significantly and the relative change in the reaction rate under strong coupling depends on the Rabi splitting energy.

The work had been published in Angewandte Chemie and you can read it here or download it from our publications page.

Wa are glad to announce a coming publication in Nano Letters (to be downloaded here), resulting from a collaboration between our group and Paolo Samori’s group. Room temperature strong coupling of WS₂ monolayer exciton transitions to metallic Fabry–Pérot and plasmonic optical cavities is demonstrated, suggesting many possibilities for combining light–matter hybridization with spin and valleytronics

We recently demonstrated evidence of non-radiative energy transfer mediated and boosted by the polaritonic states under the regime of strong coupling. When the donor and acceptor molecules are placed in a cavity, to form hybrid light-matter states with the vacuum field, the rate of energy transfer is multiplied by a factor of 7 compared to the situation outside the cavity. This work has just been published in Angewandte Chemie and you can read it here