Physical Chemistry Seminar: Liberating excitons with trapped photons

Abstract:

The poor transport properties of molecular materials are often considered the Achilles' heel of organic semiconductors, placing severe limitations on the performances of organic-electronics devices. However, by embedding the molecules in a resonant photonic structure, their wave functions can be hybridized with the photonic ones to create composite quantum excitations, which are partly photonic and partly excitonic.

In this talk I will show how this entanglement between light and matter can provide a novel pathway for enhancing the transport properties of materials, boosting the typical transport range from several nanometers to tens of microns. Furthermore, I will present our ultrafast time-resolved imaging measurements, where we revealed that the hybrid light-matter excitations exhibit a mobility transition between different types of transport mechanisms, governed by their composition.

These results provide crucial insight into the mesoscopic quantities governing cavity-enhanced transport and pave the way towards novel electro-optic devices harnessing the coherent interaction between light and matter. 
 

Seminar Organizer: Prof. Haim Diamant