Engineering long-lived vibrational states for an organic molecule

Abstract

The optomechanical character of molecules was discovered by Raman about one century ago 1 . Today, molecules are promising contenders for high-performance quantum optomechanical platforms 2-5 because their small size and large energylevel separations make them intrinsically robust against thermal agitations. Moreover, the precision and throughput of chemical synthesis can ensure a viable route to quantum technological applications. The challenge, however, is that the coupling of molecular vibrations to environmental phonons limits their coherence to picosecond time scales 6 . Here, we improve the optomechanical quality of a molecule by several orders of magnitude through phononic engineering of its surrounding. By dressing a molecule with long-lived high-frequency phonon modes of its nanoscopic environment, we achieve storage and retrieval of photons at millisecond time scales and allow for the emergence of single-photon strong coupling in optomechanics. Our strategy can be extended to the realization of molecular 1