Suppressing photochemical reactions with quantized light fields

Abstract

Photoisomerization, that is, a photochemical reaction leading to a change of molecular structure after absorption of a photon, can have detrimental effects such as leading to DNA damage under solar irradiation, or as a limiting factor for the efficiency of solar cells. Here, we show that strong coupling of organic molecules to a confined light mode can be used to strongly suppress photoisomerization, as well as other photochemical reactions, and thus convert molecules that normally show fast photodegradation into photostable forms. We find this to be especially efficient in the case of collective strong coupling, where the distribution of a single excitation over many molecules and the light mode leads to a collective protection effect that almost completely suppresses the photochemical reaction.

Entanglement between living bacteria and quantized light witnessed by Rabi splitting

“…A special class of these particles, known as organic surface plasmon polaritons, have been showcased in a series of recent experiments where quantized light and organic matter were strongly coupled via cavities and organic semiconductors [9,10], down to the level of manipulating single organic molecules at room temperature [11]. Besides the inherent interest that the hybrid states of light and matter present, they are predicted to find uses such as in controlling the chemical kinetics in a wide class of photochemical reactions [12].…”

Cavity-Enhanced Transport of Charge

“…PACS numbers: 05.60. Gg, 42.50.Pq, 74.40.Gh, The study of strong light-matter interactions [1][2][3][4] is playing an increasingly crucial role in understanding as well as engineering new states of matter with relevance to the fields of quantum optics [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], solid state physics [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], as well as quantum chemistry [32][33][34][35][36] and material science [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][...…”

Inducing Multiple Reactions with a Single Photon

“…Polaritonic chemistry, i.e., the potential to manipulate chemical structure and reactions through the formation of polaritons (hybrid light-matter states) was experimentally demonstrated in 2012 [7], and has become a topic of intense experimental and theoretical research in the past few years [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. However, existing applications and proposals have been limited to enhancing or suppressing the rates of single-molecule reactions.…”

“…This means that the quantum yield ϕ ¼ N prod =N phot of the reaction, which describes the percentage of molecules that end up in the desired reaction product per absorbed photon, has a maximum value of 1. This limit can be overcome in some specific cases, such as in photochemically induced chain reactions [2-4], or in systems that support singlet fission to create multiple triplet excitons (and thus electron-hole pairs) in solar cells [5,6].Polaritonic chemistry, i.e., the potential to manipulate chemical structure and reactions through the formation of polaritons (hybrid light-matter states) was experimentally demonstrated in 2012 [7], and has become a topic of intense experimental and theoretical research in the past few years [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. However, existing applications and proposals have been limited to enhancing or suppressing the rates of single-molecule reactions.…”