Tianchu and Pranay's polariton paper accepted in J. Phys. Chem. Lett.

Congratulations to Tianchu and Pranay for their paper “For molecular polaritons, disorder and phonon timescales control the activation of dark states in the thermodynamic limit,” just accepted in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters! With Qiang Shi, they developed a hybrid matrix product state–hierarchical equations of motion approach that simulates polariton dynamics exactly, from a handful of molecules all the way to the thermodynamic limit. This lets them answer how many molecules it takes for collective light–matter behavior to emerge, and shows that disorder and phonon timescales control when and how fast dark/gray states dissipate energy.