The ground-state deprotection of a simple alkynylsilane is studied under vibrational strong coupling to the zero-point fluctuations, or vacuum electromagnetic field, of a resonant IR microfluidic cavity. The reaction rate decreased by a factor of up to 5.5 when the Si-C vibrational stretching modes of the reactant were strongly coupled. The relative change in the reaction rate under strong coup...

We studied scattering and extinction of individual silver nanorods coupled to the J-aggregate form of the cyanine dye TDBC as a function of plasmon--exciton detuning. The measured single particle spectra exhibited a strongly suppressed scattering and extinction rate at wavelengths corresponding to the J-aggregate absorption band, signaling strong interaction between the localized surface plasmo...

We describe photonic crystal microcavities with very strong light-matter interaction to realize roomtemperature, equilibrium, exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). This goal is achieved through a careful balance between strong light trapping in a photonic band gap (PBG) and large exciton density enabled by a multiple quantum-well (QW) structure with a moderate dielectric constant....

We experimentally demonstrate collective strong coupling, optical bi-stability (OB) and all-optical switching in a system consisting of ultracold Rb atoms, trapped in a dark magneto-optical trap (DMOT), coupled to an optical Fabry-Perot cavity. The strong coupling is established by measuring the vacuum Rabi splitting (VRS) of a weak onaxis probe beam. The dependence of VRS on the probe beam pow...

We present an ideal realization of the Tavis-Cummings model in the absence of atom number and coupling fluctuations by embedding a discrete number of fully controllable superconducting qubits at fixed positions into a transmission line resonator. Measuring the vacuum Rabi mode splitting with one, two, and three qubits strongly coupled to the cavity field, we explore both bright and dark dressed...

We demonstrate highly efficient switching of optical signals between two optical fibers controlled by a single atom. The key element of our experiment is a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator, which is coupled to a single atom and interfaced by two tapered fiber couplers. This system reaches the strong coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics, leading to a vacuum Rabi splitti...

The strong coupling limit of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) implies the capability of a matterlike quantum system to coherently transform an individual excitation into a single photon within a resonant structure. This not only enables essential processes required for quantum information processing but also allows for fundamental studies of matter-light interaction. In this work, we demons...

The two peaks of the vacuum Rabi splitting behave like simple harmonic oscillators for very weak excitation. The transmission spectrum of a cavity filled with two-level atoms shows this doublet at low values of the driving intensity, but only a single peak at high values. The evolution from a doublet to a singlet is governed by the anharmonic response of the system as the driving intensity incr...

We discuss possible quantum mechanical aspects of MicroTubules (MT), based on recent developments in quantum physics. We focus on potential mechanisms for 'energy-loss-free' transport along the microtubules, which could be considered as realizations of Fröhlich's ideas on the rôle of solitons for superconductivity and/or biological matter. In particular, by representing the MT arrangements as c...

The theory for spontaneous coherence of short-lived quasiparticles in two-dimensional excitonic systems is reviewed, in particular, quantum wells (QWs) and graphene layers (GLs) embedded in microcavities. Experiments with polaritons in an optical microcavity have already shown evidence of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in the lowest quantum state in a harmonic trap. The theory of BEC and supe...