Extended Hybridization and Energy Transfer in Periodic Multi‐Material Organic Structures in Strong Coupling with Surface Plasmon

Abstract

The strong light−matter coupling, occurring when the light−matter interaction prevails on the damping, has found applications beyond the domain of optics in chemistry or transport. These advances make the development of various structures in strong coupling crucial. In this paper, a new way to hybridize two materials and transfer energy through a surface plasmon over micrometric distances is proposed. For this purpose, two patterned interlocked dye arrays, one donor and one acceptor, are deposited on a silver surface by successive micro-contact printing, leading to a pattern of 5 microns period. The dispersion relation of the structure is measured with reflectometry experiments, showing the hybridization with the plasmon, and the formation of states that mix both excitons and the plasmon with similar weights. The mixing in these polaritonic metasurfaces enables an energy transfer mechanism in the strong coupling, which is observed with luminescence experiments. As the donor and acceptor are spatially separated by a distance larger than the diffraction limit the excitation transfer is directly measured and evaluated by comparison with dye arrays without silver.