soft yet strong

Many strong-coupling experiments involve metal-based various cavity architectures to generate new eigenstates of the hybrid system. One advantage of using the plasmonic modes of individual metal nanoparticles is that such modes are dispersionless. We set out to see if a simple but novel architecture of soft (plastic) dielectric microspheres could be used instead. Said Adarsh Vasista, the post-doc leading the work, ” such microspheres do not suffer from heating losses, they can be easily functionalized and molded, optically trapped and manipukated, are non-toxic, bio-compatible, and yield open cavities! For this new work, published in the leading journal Nano Letters, Adarsh strongly coupled TDBC molecules to the modes of polystyrene microspheres that were 2 – 3 microns in diameter, he was able to acheive strong coupling even at the monomolecular layer limit.