Figure 1
Control of electron-transfer reaction by ultrastrongly coupling a molecular vibration to an optical cavity. (a) Schematic illustration of the configuration taken by the surrounding molecular environment (blue ellipsoids) in accordance with the charge distribution of the molecule (yellow ellipsoid), whose single vibration mode is coupled to a single mode of the optical cavity (magenta). (b) Formation of the energy eigenstates of the molecule-plus-cavity hybrid system by an ultrastrong coupling between the molecular vibration and the cavity mode. The ultrastrong coupling regime refers to the case that the coupling strength is comparable in magnitude with both the vibration and the cavity frequencies. The lowest-energy eigenstate of the hybrid system is a superposition of |nv, nc〉 states with nv, nc = 0, 1, 2, … representing the numbers of vibrational quanta and photons, respectively (see the main text for details).
