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Recent experiments and theory suggest that ground state properties and reactivity of molecules can be modified when placed inside a nanoscale cavity, giving rise to strong coupling between vibrational modes and the quantized cavity field. This is commonly thought to be caused either by a cavity-distorted Born-Oppenheimer ground state potential or by the formation of light-matter hybrid states, vibrational polaritons. Here, we systematically study the effect of a cavity on ground state properties and infrared spectra of single molecules, considering vibration-cavity coupling strengths from zero up to the vibrational ultrastrong coupling regime. Using single-mode models for Li-H and O-H stretch modes and for the NH3 inversion mode, respectively, a single cavity mode in resonance with vibrational transitions is coupled to position-dependent molecular dipole functions. We address the influence of the cavity mode on polariton ground state energies, equilibrium bond lengths, dissociation energies, activation energies for isomerization, and on vibro-polaritonic infrared spectra. In agreement with earlier work, we observe all mentioned properties being strongly affected by the cavity, but only if the dipole self-energy contribution in the interaction Hamiltonian is neglected. When this term is included, these properties do not depend significantly on the coupling anymore. Vibro-polaritonic infrared spectra, in contrast, are always affected by the cavity mode due to the formation of excited vibrational polaritons. It is argued that the quantized nature of vibrational polaritons is key to not only interpreting molecular spectra in cavities but also understanding the experimentally observed modification of molecular reactivity in cavities.
We study theoretically the quantum dynamics and spectroscopy of rovibrational polaritons formed in a model system composed of a single rovibrating diatomic molecule, which interacts with two degenerate, orthogonally polarized modes of an optical Fabry-Perot cavity. We employ an effective rovibrational Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian in length gauge representation and identify three-state vibro-polaritonic conical intersections (VPCIs) between singly excited vibro-polaritonic states in a two-dimensional angular coordinate branching space. The lower and upper vibrational polaritons are of mixed light-matter hybrid character, whereas the intermediate state is purely photonic in nature. The VPCIs provide effective population transfer channels between singly excited vibrational polaritons, which manifest in rich interference patterns in rotational densities. Spectroscopically, three bright singly excited states are identified when an external infrared laser field couples to both a molecular and a cavity mode. The non-trivial VPCI topology manifests as pronounced multi-peak progression in the spectral region of the upper vibrational polariton, which is traced back to the emergence of rovibro-polaritonic light-matter hybrid states. Experimentally, ubiquitous spontaneous emission from cavity modes induces a dissipative reduction of intensity and peak broadening, which mainly influences the purely photonic intermediate state peak as well as the rovibro-polaritonic progression. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.
We discuss an efficient Hierarchical Effective Mode (HEM) representation of a high-dimensional harmonic oscillator bath, which describes phonon-driven vibrational relaxation of an adsorbate-surface system, namely, deuterium adsorbed on Si(100). Starting from the original Hamiltonian of the adsorbate-surface system, the HEM representation is constructed via iterative orthogonal transformations, which are efficiently implemented with Householder matrices. The detailed description of the HEM representation and its construction are given in the second quantization representation. The hierarchical nature of this representation allows access to the exact quantum dynamics of the adsorbate-surface system over finite time intervals, controllable via the truncation order of the hierarchy. To study the convergence properties of the effective mode representation, we solve the time-dependent Schrodinger equation of the truncated system-bath HEM Hamiltonian, with the help of the multilayer extension of the Multiconfigurational Time-Dependent Hartree (ML-MCTDH) method. The results of the HEM representation are compared with those obtained with a quantum-mechanical tier-model. The convergence of the HEM representation with respect to the truncation order of the hierarchy is discussed for different initial conditions of the adsorbate-surface system. The combination of the HEM representation with the ML-MCTDH method provides information on the time evolution of the system (adsorbate) and multiple effective modes of the bath (surface). This permits insight into mechanisms of vibration-phonon coupling of the adsorbate-surface system, as well as inter-mode couplings of the effective bath.