Strong coupling of collective intermolecular vibrations in organic materials at terahertz frequencies

" In the strong coupling regime, the interaction between light and matter overcomes all the incoherent and dissipative processes, which profoundly changes its nature. In this regime, the wavefunctions of the photons and the material excitations are coherently mixed to form hybrid light-matter quantum states known as polaritons." {Credits 1}

" Here, we demonstrate strong coupling of collective vibrations in ensembles of organic α-lactose molecules, occurring at 0.53 THz. ... We observe the Rabi-splitting typical of strong coupling and coherent Rabi-oscillations at room temperature, despite the fact that the energy of the collective vibrational transition (ℏν_vib~2 meV), as well as the light-matter interaction strength, are much lower than kBT (~25 meV)." {Credits 1}

{Credits 1} 🎪 Damari, R., Weinberg, O., Krotkov, D. et al. Strong coupling of collective intermolecular vibrations in organic materials at terahertz frequencies. Nat Commun 10, 3248 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11130-y. © The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.