Growing experimental and theoretical evidence indicates that a variety of molecular photophysical processes can be non-trivially altered in the strong light-matter coupling regime. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work exploring changes in photoinduced electron transfer and electroabsorption that arise upon resonantly exciting polariton modes. In the case of electron transfer, we study charge transfer state fluorescence in donor-acceptor blends as well as photoconductivity that originates from polaron (i.e. charged molecule) absorption, demonstrating that both become more efficient when polariton modes are excited as opposed to uncoupled molecules. In the case of electroabsorption, we study subphthalocyanine molecules in a Fabry-Perot cavity and find that a classical transfer matrix-based description fails for the polariton modes, effectively implying that the polarizability change associated with these excitations depends on their detuning. We discuss models to explain both of these results, providing new insight into how strong coupling alters photoinduced electron transfer and optical nonlinearity (electroabsorption reflects Im[χ<sup>(3)</sup>(ω,0,0)]) in organic thin films.

Electron transfer and electroabsorption in the strong coupling regime

ACS Spring 2022

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