Impact of cavity on interatomic Coulombic decay.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34215732.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-24221-6 and PMC identifier 8253799.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) is an efficient electronic decay process of systems embedded in environment. In ICD, the excess energy of an excited atom A is efficiently utilized to ionize a neighboring atom B. In quantum light, an ensemble of atoms A form polaritonic states which can undergo ICD with B. Here we investigate the impact of quantum light on ICD and show that this process is strongly altered compared to classical ICD. The ICD rate depends sensitively on the atomic distribution and orientation of the ensemble. It is stressed that in contrast to superposition states formed by a laser, forming polaritons by a cavity enables to control the emergence and suppression, as well as the efficiency of ICD.