Scientific Progress In Controlling Light-matter Coherence

Interaction between light and matter is one of the most common scientific phenomena in everyday life, from the sunlight reflecting off the landscape early in the morning to the light emitted by our computer screens late at night. Yet, the deeper scientific understanding remains a fascinating area of research with many unknowns. In an impressive new study by Ahn et al. published in Science, the interaction between light and matter was studied by coupling molecular vibrations to microcavity modes. The rate of a chemical reaction was shown to be changed by tuning the microcavity modes.

The paper references our earlier work, in which an AI model was used to find an optimal shape of a light pulse to maintain quantum coherence for a longer period of time. Coherent quantum states are used for quantum computation, but such states are fragile and decay quickly unless they are actively protected against decoherence. Although the primary result of our work was the