Speaker
Description
Strong light-matter interaction leads to the formation of hybrid polariton states and alters the photophysical dynamics of organic materials and biological systems without modifying their chemical structure. Here, we experimentally investigated a well-known photosynthetic protein, light harvesting 2 complexes (LH2) from purple bacteria under both strong and weak coupling with the light mode of a Fabry-Perot optical microcavity. Using femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy, we analysed the polariton dynamics of the strongly coupled system. We observed a significant prolongation of the excited state lifetime compared with the bare exciton, which can be explained in terms of the exciton reservoir model. We also demonstrated cavity-mediated excitation transfer between different complexes even in case of weak effective light-mater interaction.
