seed projects

Renee Frontiera, Russell Holmes, Ognjen Ilic:
Chiral polaritonic materials

Figure 1. Left: schematic depiction of polaritonic system. Center: Energy level diagram. Right: Resonance Raman system for probing chiral polaritons.

The goal of this Seed is to develop materials design principles for the rapid manipulation of light polarization and propagation through control of chiral polaritons. Polaritons are hybridized light-matter states, in which light, usually in a nanophotonic structure, couples strongly to matter, here consisting of a molecular crystal or thin film. Understanding the fundamental materials design principles of a chiral polaritonic system, including how to design the nanophotonic cavity, as well as how to select, deposit, and orient the matter, is crucial for advancing this field and is the goal of this Seed. Ultimately, we aim to use chiral matter and circularly polarized light in order to realize controlled energy and chirality transfer, including control light propagation on ultrafast timescales as well as to control optical activity properties in matter. We use a combined synthetic, experimental, and computational approach to determine how chiral and achiral molecules impact the chirality of light in a polaritonic cavity, as well as understanding how the optical activity of molecules is impacted by local chiral and achiral fields.

Funded by the National Science Foundation through the University of Minnesota MRSEC under Award Number DMR-2011401