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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian approach to simulate large-scale, lossy cavity polariton dynamics in molecules, capturing cavity losses explicitly in molecular dynamics simulations.

Contribution

It develops a novel method to explicitly include cavity losses in semi-classical molecular dynamics simulations of organic polaritons, enabling more realistic modeling of complex light-matter interactions.

Findings

Successfully implemented non-Hermitian Hamiltonian for cavity losses

Performed mean-field and surface hopping simulations of polariton dynamics

Revealed effects of cavity losses on energy transfer and relaxation

Abstract

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.