Molecular Polaritonics: Liberating Excitons with Confined Photons

The poor transport properties of organic semiconductors are often considered the Achilles' heel of these materials, placing severe limitations on the performances of organic-electronics devices. However, by embedding them in resonant photonic structures, their wavefunctions can be hybridized with light 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 organic electro-optic devices harnessing the coherent interaction between light and matter.

References

G. G. Rozenman, K. Akulov, A. Golombek, T. Schwartz, Long-range transport of organic exciton-polaritons revealed by ultrafast microscopy, ACS Photonics 5, 105 (2018).

M. Balasubrahmaniyam, A. Simkovich, A. Golombek, G. Sandik, G. Ankonina, T. Schwartz, From enhanced diffusion to ultrafast ballistic motion of hybrid light–matter excitations. Nature Materials 22, 338 (2023).