Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Joel Yuen-Zhou, UC San Diego

Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Joel Yuen-Zhou, UC San Diego
Date
Tue February 4th 2020, 4:30 - 5:30pm
Location
Sapp Center Lecture Hall

Physical/Theoretical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Joel Yuen-Zhou, UC San Diego (Host: Tom Markland)

About the Talk

"Polariton chemistry: molecules in optical cavities"

Organic molecules interact strongly with confined electromagnetic fields in plasmonic arrays or optical microcavities owing to their bright transition dipole moments. This interaction gives rise to molecular polaritons, hybrid light-matter quasiparticles. Molecular polaritonics opens doors for new room-temperature opportunities for the nontrivial control of physico-chemical properties of molecular assemblies [1]. In this talk, I’ll showcase some of these opportunities that we have been theoretically (and, together with our experimental collaborators) exploring in the past few years. I will briefly discuss the relevant time and energy scales associated with molecular polaritons [1,2] and strategies to exploit them to control photoexcited processes including singlet fission [3], triplet harvesting [4], remote and topologically-protected energy transfer [5-7], and anomalous nonlinear optical effects [8,9,10]. Finally, I will conclude by explaining how vibrational polaritons can steer ground-state chemical reactions even in the absence of optical pumping [11], or be used to realize exotic processes such as remote control of chemical reactions [12].

About the Speaker

Joel Yuen-Zhou got his BSc in Chemistry and Mathematics from MIT in 2007 and his PhD in Chemical Physics in 2012 from Harvard. He held the Robert J. Silbey Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Excitonics from 2013 to 2015, after which he became an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of California San Diego. His current research lies on the theoretical description of novel light-matter interactions in the weak, strong, and ultrastrong coupling regimes and has been recognized with the NSF CAREER (2017), DOE Early Career (2018), ACS Open Eye Junior Faculty (2019), and the CMOA Promising Scientist (2019) Awards.