Triplet harvesting in the polaritonic regime: A variational polaron approach

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We explore the electroluminescence efficiency for a quantum mechanical model of a large number of molecular emitters embedded in an optical microcavity. We characterize the circumstances under which a microcavity enhances harvesting of triplet excitons via reverse intersystem-crossing (R-ISC) into singlet populations that can emit light. For that end, we develop a time-local master equation in a variationally optimized frame, which allows for the exploration of the population dynamics of chemically relevant species in different regimes of emitter coupling to the condensed phase vibrational bath and to the microcavity photonic mode. For a vibrational bath that equilibrates faster than R-ISC (in emitters with weak singlet-triplet mixing), our results reveal that significant improvements in efficiencies with respect to the cavity-free counterpart can be obtained for strong coupling of the singlet exciton to a photonic mode, as long as the singlet to triplet exciton transition is within the inverted Marcus regime; under these circumstances, the activation energy barrier from the triplet to the lower polariton can be greatly reduced with respect to that from the triplet to the singlet exciton, thus overcoming the detrimental delocalization of the polariton states across a macroscopic number of molecules. On the other hand, for a vibrational bath that equilibrates slower than R-ISC (i.e., emitters with strong singlet-triplet mixing), we find that while enhancements in photoluminescence can be obtained via vibrational relaxation into polaritons, this only occurs for a small number of emitters coupled to the photon mode, with delocalization of the polaritons across many emitters eventually being detrimental to electroluminescence efficiency. These findings provide insight into the tunability of optoelectronic processes in molecular materials due to weak and strong light-matter coupling.