582 research outputs found
Loose Engel structures
This article introduces the notion of a loose family of Engel structures and
shows that two such families are Engel homotopic if and only if they are
formally homotopic. This implies a complete h-principle when some auxiliary
data is fixed. As a corollary, we show that Lorentz and orientable Cartan
prolongations are classified up to homotopy by their formal data.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, comments welcom
Quantum theory of collective strong coupling of molecular vibrations with a microcavity mode
We develop a quantum mechanical formalism to treat the strong coupling
between an electromagnetic mode and a vibrational excitation of an ensemble of
organic molecules. By employing a Bloch-Redfield-Wangsness approach, we show
that the influence of dephasing-type interactions, i.e., elastic collisions
with a background bath of phonons, critically depends on the nature of the bath
modes. In particular, for long-range phonons corresponding to a common bath,
the dynamics of the "bright state" (the collective superposition of molecular
vibrations coupling to the cavity mode) is effectively decoupled from other
system eigenstates. For the case of independent baths (or short-range phonons),
incoherent energy transfer occurs between the bright state and the uncoupled
dark states. However, these processes are suppressed when the Rabi splitting is
larger than the frequency range of the bath modes, as achieved in a recent
experiment [Shalabney et al., Nat. Commun. 6, 5981 (2015)]. In both cases, the
dynamics can thus be described through a single collective oscillator coupled
to a photonic mode, making this system an ideal candidate to explore cavity
optomechanics at room temperature.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
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