Signatures of strong coupling on nanoparticles: Revealing absorption anticrossing by tuning the dielectric environment

Abstract

The electromagnetic coupling of molecular excitations to plasmonic nanoparticles offers a promising method to manipulate the light-matter interaction at the nanoscale. Plasmonic nanoparticles foster exceptionally high coupling strengths, due to their capacity to strongly concentrate the light-field to sub-wavelength mode volumes. A particularly interesting coupling regime occurs, if the coupling increases to a level such that the coupling strength surpasses all damping rates in the system. In this so-called strong-coupling regime hybrid light-matter states emerge, which can no more be divided into separate light and matter components. These hybrids unite the features of the original components and possess new resonances whose positions are separated by the Rabi splitting energy ħΩ. Detuning the resonance of one of the components leads to an anticrossing of the two arising branches of the new resonances ω+ and ω− with a minimal separation of Ω = ω+ − ω−.