Control of Organic Matter with Strong Coupling

Scores of physical phenomena, including light emission, donor-acceptor energy transfer, wetting and chemical reactions, can be strongly modified in the vicinity of metamaterials (rationally designed metal dielectric composites) and other non-local dielectric environments. They, arguably, occur in the weak coupling regime of light-matter interaction, when the rates of the processes are affected, while the energy states of the interacting systems remain intact. Despite the richness of physical phenomena enabled by the weak coupling, an even greater control of light-matter interactions can be achieved in the strong coupling regime (of e.g. excitons in molecular ensembles and resonant cavities), when the eigen-energies of interacting states differ significantly (by ~1eV!) from those of individual not interacting constituents. We argue that such a strong change of the energy eigen values may constitute creation of a new hybridized matter, with greatly modified quantum mechanical wavefunctions, spectroscopic properties, dispersion, surface potentials, electron transport and pathways of chemical reactions.