Collective Chemistry in Optical Cavities

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This work is about an important class of chemical reactions, electron transfer, that can be enhanced by orders of magnitude by the simple fact of placing the reactants in an optical cavity that strongly drives an electronic transition in the electron donor. We show that the mechanism for this reaction rate enhancement has to do with a single photon suppressing the nuclear motions that a transferred electron encounters in its way from donor to acceptor. This work brings quantum optics and chemical dynamics together for the first time.

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