Speaker
Description
Localized surface plasmons, collective excitations of conduction electrons in nanostructures, are associated to enhanced and spatially localized electromagnetic fields that can strongly couple the plasmonic excitations with the electronic ones of nearby molecules. The resulting hybrid excitations, called plexcitons, share with polaritons the capability of potentially modifying the molecular photophysics and photochemistry by reshaping the potential energy surfaces of the molecules, introducing new excited state decay channels and in general mediating the interaction with light.
In this talk I will present the multiscale modeling approach that we have developed to investigate optical properties and time evolution of plexcitonic systems. The model is based on an atomistic quantum chemistry description of molecules and a quantized continuum model representation of the plasmonic nanostructures, Q-PCM-NP [1]. Based on such an approach, we have investigated the microscopic picture behind collective plexciton states in dye covered nanoparticle aggregates [2], the ultrafast evolution of plexcitons [3] and could compare this quantized and the corresponding semiclassical description of molecule-plasmon interactions [4].
[1] J. Fregoni et al., Nano Lett 21, 6664 (2021); M. Romanelli, G. Gil, S. Corni arXiv:2512.01538
[2] G. Parolin et al. Nano Lett 24, 2273 (2024)
[3] J. Kuttruff et al. Nat Commun 14, 3875 (2023)
[4] M. Romanelli and S. Corni, J Phys Chem Lett 15, 9326 (2024)