Engineering dipole-dipole couplings for enhanced cooperative light-matter interactions

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to engineer dipole-dipole interactions using a metallic sphere within a ring of dipoles, enabling steady-state superabsorption at room temperature and offering a versatile design approach for quantum energy systems.

Contribution

It introduces a new design paradigm that uses a metallic sphere to control dipole interactions, surpassing previous methods in simplicity and effectiveness for cooperative light-matter effects.

Findings

Achieves steady-state superabsorption at room temperature.

Outperforms previous designs in efficiency.

Provides a versatile approach for quantum energy transport systems.

Abstract

Cooperative optical effects are enabled and controlled by interactions between molecular dipoles, meaning that their mutual orientation is of paramount importance to, for example, superabsorbing light-harvesting antennas. Here we show how to move beyond the possibilities of simple geometric tailoring, demonstrating how a metallic sphere placed within a ring of parallel dipoles engineers an effective Hamiltonian that generates "guide-sliding" states within the ring system. This allows steady-state superabsorption in noisy room temperature environments, outperforming previous designs while being significantly simpler to implement. As exemplified by this showcase, our approach represents a powerful design paradigm for tailoring cooperative light-matter effects in molecular structures that extends beyond superabsorbing systems, to a huge array of quantum energy transport systems.