Coherent Light Harvesting through Strong Coupling to Confined Light

When photoactive molecules interact strongly with confined light modes, new hybrid light-matter states may form: the polaritons. These polaritons are coherent superpositions of excitations of the molecules and of the cavity photon. Recently, polaritons were shown to mediate energy transfer between chromophores at distances beyond the Förster limit. Here we explore the potential of strong coupling for light-harvesting applications by means of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of mixtures of photoreactive and non-photo-reactive molecules strongly coupled to a single confined light mode. These molecules are spatially separated and present at different concentrations. Our simulations sug…

Pienestä syntyi suurta = Nano came to Jyväskylä

Absence of mutual polariton scatterings for strongly coupled surface plasmon polaritons and dye molecules with large Stokes shift

The understanding and control of the dynamics of hybrid modes consisting of strongly coupled surface plasmon polaritons and molecular excitations of dye molecules is of great timely interest, as it allows one to tailor interactions between optical signals as needed for active all-optical devices. Here we utilize dye molecules with an especially large Stokes shift to demonstrate the absence of mutual scatterings among the strongly coupled hybrid modes. We employ a quantum mechanical three-level model and show that the hybrid modes decay via dephasing and internal relaxation of the molecules to a fluorescing state of the dye, which can be used as a measure for the decay. Our results provide e…

Strong coupling between surface plasmon polaritons and \beta-carotene in nanolayered system

In this article we experimentally demonstrate the strong coupling between surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) and the S2 state of β-carotene. The SPPs are excited by prism coupling technique on a thin silver film with β-carotene embedded in a polymer layer on top of that. Rabi splittings with energies 80 and 130 meV are observed in the recorded dispersion relations. Both coupled oscillator model and transfer matrix method are used to fit the experimental results. The scattered radiation of the propagating strongly coupled SPP-S2 hybrids is collected and an increase of the low energy splitting to 120 meV is observed compared to the reflectivity data. In addition, we performed molecule excitatio…

Plasmonic nanosensor array for multiplexed DNA-based pathogen detection

In this research we introduce a plasmonic nanoparticle based optical biosensor for monitoring of molecular binding events. The sensor utilizes spotted gold nanoparticle arrays as sensing platform. The nanoparticle spots are functionalized with capture DNA sequences complementary to the analyte (target) DNA. Upon incubation with the target sequence, it will bind on the respectively complementary functionalized particle spot. This binding changes the local refractive index, which is detected spectroscopically as the resulting changes of the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) peak wavelength. In order to increase the signal, a small gold nanoparticle label is introduced. The binding ca…

Transport phenomena and decoherence in short Josephson junction arrays