arXiv subjects

Gerrit Groenhof

Publications and source records attributed to Gerrit Groenhof.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mode-Selective and Anharmonicity-Controlled Energy Transport in Cavity-Coupled Water

Recent experiments demonstrate the modification of chemical dynamics via cavity-enhanced vibrational energy transport. Here, we provide a microscopic account of both photonic and mode-selective energy transport using direct mesoscale on-the-fly simulations and provide the mechanistic principles of cavity-modified transport under vibrational strong coupling. We find that molecular anharmonicity plays a crucial role in dictating photonic transport, and driving-dependent photonic localization occurs when coupling cavity modes to a highly anharmonic mode of the molecular system. We demonstrate this in cavity-coupled water by tuning the photon frequency (at normal incidence) close to either the harmonic (or weakly anharmonic) bending mode or the anharmonic stretching modes of water. We confirm our understanding using a simple model system by reproducing the photonic transport and its localization. We also demonstrate that the diffusion of mode-selective temperature, quantified via the variance of the H-O-H bond angle or of the O-H bond length, is highly dependent on the cavity photon frequency. We show that the cavity photon frequency can be used as a tuning knob to achieve and control mode-selective energy transport. We also provide a simple analytical understanding of this phenomenon. Our results highlight the rich dynamical interplay of molecular and photonic degrees of freedom that persist in real atomistic systems.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

Toward Reliable Spectroscopic Analysis of Reaction Kinetics in Polaritonic Chemistry

Recent reports suggest that chemical reaction rates can change when reactants are placed inside an optical cavity. These effects have been attributed to the hybridization of molecular vibrational modes with cavity modes into polaritons, but the underlying mechanism remains debated. Recently, attempts to reproduce the key experiments have sometimes failed, which poses also ambiguity and impedes the determination of the possible mechanism. Without a reliable theoretical framework, polaritonic chemistry -- which seeks to use optical resonators as catalysts to control reactions -- has reached a pivotal stage. Standardized protocols for reproducible cavity experiments are therefore urgently needed. Here, we identify pitfalls in approaches that monitor reaction progress with UV/Vis spectroscopy. Using the Transfer Matrix Method, we analyze a model pseudo-first-order reaction and assess how transient cavity thickness variations, cavity inhomogeneity, and fitting protocols influence the extracted rate constant. We find that changes in cavity thickness upon reactant introduction can strongly distort apparent kinetics when monitoring at a single wavelength, an artifact that can be mitigated by spectral smoothing. Additionally, we demonstrate that, unlike in many previous studies, the asymptotic extinction should be treated as a fitting parameter rather than fixed to the final experimental value. By identifying these pitfalls, our work lays the foundation for more robust analyses and reliable measurements in polaritonic chemistry.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2026

Benchmarking mixed quantum-classical dynamics for collective electronic strong coupling

Experiments indicate that collective coupling of molecular ensembles to confined optical modes can modify excited-state dynamics and photochemical reactivity. To describe such cavity-induced effects at atomic resolution, semi-classical molecular dynamics approaches have been developed that treat nuclear motion classically while describing the collective light-matter interaction within the Tavis-Cummings framework of quantum electrodynamics. Here, we benchmark mixed quantum-classical approaches, Ehrenfest dynamics and Fewest-Switches Surface Hopping (FSSH), for simulating nonadiabatic dynamics of electronically strongly coupled carbon monoxide molecules. Their predictions are compared against numerically exact quantum dynamics simulations performed with the multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree (MCTDH) method, which treats both electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom quantum mechanically. We find that the semi-classical approaches reproduce the qualitative features of the full quantum dynamics. Quantitative agreement is best achieved with FSSH when a decoherence correction is included. These results demonstrate that mixed quantum-classical methods provide a computationally efficient and quantitatively reliable alternative to fully quantum simulations for investigating nonadiabatic photochemistry under collective electronic strong coupling in systems beyond the reach of exact quantum treatments.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2025

Incorporating QM/MM molecular dynamics into the few-mode quantization approach for light-matter interactions in nanophotonic structures

In the context of light-matter interactions between organic chromophores and confined photons of (plasmonic) nano-resonators, we introduce a general framework that couples ab initio QM/MM molecular dynamics with few-mode field quantization to simulate light-matter interactions of molecular emitters at the nanoscale. Arbitrary, lossy, and spatially inhomogeneous photonic environments are represented by a minimal set of interacting modes fitted to their spectral density, while geometry-dependent molecular properties are computed on the fly. Applications to few-molecule strong coupling show that strong coupling persists when molecular degrees of freedom and disorder are included for the chosen system consisting of a nanoparticle dimer coupled to multiple emitters. At the same time, symmetry-protected degeneracies of two-level models are lifted. The framework further reveals how spatial field inhomogeneity and molecular disorder shape cavity-mediated energy transfer, illustrated for an HBQ-Methylene Blue donor-acceptor combination in a five-emitter system.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Disentangling enhanced diffusion and ballistic motion of excitons coupled to Bloch surface waves with molecular dynamics simulations

Placing an organic material on top of a Bragg mirror can significantly enhance exciton transport. Such enhancement has been attributed to strong coupling between the evanescent Bloch surface waves (BSW) on the mirror, and the excitons in the material. In this regime, the BSW and excitons hybridize into Bloch surface wave polaritons (BSWP), new quasi-particles with both photonic and excitonic character. While recent experiments unveiled a mixed nature of the enhanced transport, the role of the material degrees of freedom in this process remains unclear. To clarify their role, we performed atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of an ensemble of Methylene blue molecules, a prototype organic emitter, strongly coupled to a BSW. In contrast to the established static models of polaritons, even with disorder included, our dynamic simulations reveal a correlation between the photonic content of the BSWP and the nature of the transport. In line with experiment, we find ballistic motion for polaritons with high photonic character, and enhanced diffusion if the photonic content is low. Our simulations furthermore suggest that the diffusion is due to thermally activated vibrations that drive population transfer between the stationary dark states and mobile bright polaritonic states.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Quantum dynamics simulation of exciton-polariton transport

Strong coupling between excitons and confined modes of light presents a promising pathway to tunable and enhanced energy transport in organic materials. By forming hybrid light-matter quasiparticles, exciton-polaritons, electronic excitations can traverse long distances at high velocities through ballistic flow. However, transport behavior of exciton-polaritons varies strongly across experiments, spanning both diffusive and ballistic transport regimes. Which properties of the material and light-modes govern the transport behavior of polaritons remains an open question. Through full-quantum dynamical simulations we reveal a strong dependence of polariton transport on vibronic interactions within molecules in both ideal and lossy cavities. Specifically, we show that intramolecular vibrations mediate relaxation processes that alter polariton composition, lifetime and velocity on ultrafast timescales. Analysis of the propagating wavepacket in position and momentum space provides mechanistic insight into the robustness of ballistic flow of exciton-polaritons found experimentally under cryogenic conditions.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Alternant Hydrocarbon Diradicals as Optically Addressable Molecular Qubits

High-spin molecules allow for bottom-up qubit design and are promising platforms for magnetic sensing and quantum information science. Optical addressability of molecular electron spins has also been proposed in first-row transition metal complexes via optically-detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) mechanisms analogous to the diamond-NV colour centre. However, significantly less progress has been made on the front of metal-free molecules, which can deliver lower costs and milder environmental impacts. At present, most luminescent open-shell organic molecules are $\pi$-diradicals, but such systems often suffer from poor ground-state open-shell characters necessary to realise a stable ground-state molecular qubit. In this work, we use alternancy symmetry to selectively minimise radical-radical interactions in the ground state, generating $\pi$-systems with high diradical characters. We call them m-dimers, referencing the need to covalently link two benzylic radicals at their meta carbon atoms for the desired symmetry. Through a detailed electronic structure analysis, we find that the excited states of alternant hydrocarbon m-diradicals contain important symmetries that can be used to construct ODMR mechanisms leading to ground-state spin polarisation. The molecular parameters are set in the context of a tris(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)methyl (TTM) radical dimer covalently tethered at the meta position, demonstrating the feasibility of alternant m-diradicals as molecular colour centres.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Non-Hermitian molecular dynamics simulations of exciton-polaritons in lossy cavities

The observation that materials can change their properties when placed inside or near an optical resonator, has sparked a fervid interest in understanding the effects of strong light-matter coupling on molecular dynamics, and several approaches have been proposed to extend the methods of computational chemistry into this regime. Whereas the majority of these approaches have focused on modelling a single molecule coupled to a single cavity mode, changes to chemistry have so far only been observed experimentally when very many molecules are coupled collectively to multiple modes with short lifetimes. While atomistic simulations of many molecules coupled to multiple cavity modes have been performed with semi-classical molecular dynamics, an explicit description of cavity losses has so far been restricted to simulations in which only a very few molecular degrees of freedom were considered. Here, we have implemented an effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian to explicitly treat cavity losses in large-scale semi-classical molecular dynamics simulations of organic polaritons and used it to perform both mean-field and surface hopping simulations of polariton relaxation, propagation and energy transfer.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Photochemical Initiation of Polariton Propagation

Placing a material inside an optical cavity can enhance transport of excitation energy by hybridizing excitons with confined light modes into polaritons, which have a dispersion that provides these light-matter quasi-particles with low effective masses and very high group velocities. While in experiments polariton propagation is typically initiated with laser pulses, tuned to be resonant either with the polaritonic branches that are delocalized over many molecules, or with an uncoupled higher-energy electronic excited state that is localized on a single molecule, practical implementations of polariton-mediated exciton transport into devices would require operation under low-intensity incoherent light conditions. Here, we propose to initiate polaritonic exciton transport with a photo-acid, which upon absorption of a photon in a spectral range not strongly reflected by the cavity mirrors, undergoes ultra-fast excited-state proton transfer into a red-shifted excited-state photo-product that can couple collectively with a large number of suitable dye molecules to the modes of the cavity. By means of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations we demonstrate that cascading energy from a photo-excited donor into the strongly coupled acceptor-cavity states can indeed induce long-range polariton-mediated exciton transport.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Tuning the Coherent Propagation of Organic Exciton-Polaritons through the Cavity Q-factor

Transport of excitons in organic materials can be enhanced through polariton formation when the interaction strength between these excitons and the confined light modes of an optical resonator exceeds their decay rates. While the polariton lifetime is determined by the Q(uality)-factor of the optical resonator, the polariton group velocity is not. Instead, the latter is solely determined by the polariton dispersion. Yet, experiments suggest that the Q-factor also controls the polariton propagation velocity. To understand this observation, we performed molecular dynamics simulations of Rhodamine chromophores strongly coupled to Fabry-P\'erot cavities with various Q-factors. Our results suggest that propagation in the aforementioned experiments is initially dominated by ballistic motion of upper polariton states at their group velocities, which leads to a rapid expansion of the wavepacket. Cavity decay in combination with non-adiabatic population transfer into dark states, rapidly depletes these bright states, causing the wavepacket to contract. However, because population transfer is reversible, propagation continues, but as a diffusion process, at lower velocity. By controlling the lifetime of bright states, the Q-factor determines the duration of the ballistic phase and the diffusion coefficient in the diffusive regime. Thus, polariton propagation in organic microcavities can be effectively tuned through the Q-factor.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2022

Enhanced Excitation Energy Transfer under Strong Light-Matter Coupling: Insights from Multi-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Exciton transport can be enhanced in the strong coupling regime where excitons hybridise with confined light modes to form polaritons. Because polaritons have group velocity, their propagation should be ballistic and long-ranged. However, experiments indicate that organic polaritons propagate in a diffusive manner and more slowly than their group velocity. Here, we resolve this controversy by means of molecular dynamics simulations of Rhodamine molecules in a Fabry-P\'{e}rot cavity. Our results suggest that polariton propagation is limited by the cavity lifetime and appears diffusive due to reversible population transfers between polaritonic states that propagate ballistically at their group velocity, and dark states that are stationary. Furthermore, because long-lived dark states transiently trap the excitation, propagation is observed on timescales beyond the intrinsic polariton lifetime. These insights not only help to better understand and interpret experimental observations, but also pave the way towards rational design of molecule-cavity systems for coherent exciton transport.

physics.chem-ph↗