Organic semiconductors are an emerging class of materials for opto-electronic devices such as solar cells and organic light emitting diodes. As a result, it's important to tune materials properties for specific requirements like efficient light absorption and emission, long excited state lifetimes, or more exotic properties (such as singlet fission). One of the advantages of these organic semiconductors over conventional inorganic semiconductors is that by changing the design of the molecules many different properties can be generated. For his Ph.D. research, Anton Berghuis explored changing materials properties using light.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Advancements in nanofabrication techniques enabled the structuring of matter on the scale of the wavelength of light. By doing so, the interaction of light and matter may be enhanced, leading to interesting new properties. In his Ph.D. research, Anton Berghuis and his collaborators designed a nanostructure consisting of silver nanoparticles placed in a rectangular lattice such that the cavity supports resonances in the optical regime. When tuning the optical resonance to the exciton energy in an organic semiconductor, the light in the cavity and the exciton may interact when the semiconductor is placed on top of the cavity. When this interaction is stronger than the average of the losses of the exciton and the cavity, the interaction results in a hybridization of the exciton and cavity mode and we speak of the strong coupling regime. The hybridization is described by the…