Increasing how strongly infrared light interacts with atomic vibrations

 Increasing how strongly infrared light interacts with atomic vibrations in materials can improve these applications, among others. This can be accomplished by trapping the light into a small volume containing the materials. Trapping light can be as simple as making it reflect back and forth between a pair of mirrors, but stronger interactions can be realized if nanometer-scale metallic structures, or “nanocavities,” are used to confine the light on ultrasmall length scales.

Under these conditions, interactions can be strong enough that the quantum-mechanical nature of the light and the vibrations comes into play. In that situation, the absorbed energy is transferred back and forth between the light in the what does a computer engineer do and the atomic vibrations in the material at a rate fast enough that the light photon and matter phonon can no longer be distinguished. Those strongly coupled modes result in new quantum mechanical objects that are part light and part vibration at the same time, known as polaritons.

The stronger the interaction, the stranger the quantum mechanical effects that can occur. If the interaction becomes strong enough, it could be possible to create photons out of the vacuum or to make chemical reactions proceed in ways that are otherwise impossible.