Engineering long-lived vibrational states for an organic molecule

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how phononic engineering of a molecule's environment can significantly extend its vibrational coherence, enabling millisecond photon storage and strong single-photon coupling in molecular optomechanics.

Contribution

The authors introduce a method to enhance molecular vibrational coherence by engineering surrounding phononic modes, achieving millisecond photon storage and strong coupling.

Findings

Achieved millisecond photon storage in molecules.

Enhanced optomechanical quality by orders of magnitude.

Enabled single-photon strong coupling in molecular systems.

Abstract

The optomechanical character of molecules was discovered by Raman about one century ago. Today, molecules are promising contenders for high-performance quantum optomechanical platforms because their small size and large energy-level separations make them intrinsically robust against thermal agitations. Moreover, the precision and throughput of chemical synthesis can ensure a viable route to quantum technological applications. The challenge, however, is that the coupling of molecular vibrations to environmental phonons limits their coherence to picosecond time scales. Here, we improve the optomechanical quality of a molecule by several orders of magnitude through phononic engineering of its surrounding. By dressing a molecule with long-lived high-frequency phonon modes of its nanoscopic environment, we achieve storage and retrieval of photons at millisecond time scales and allow for the emergence of single-photon strong coupling in optomechanics. Our strategy can be extended to the realization of molecular optomechanical networks.