Hybrid Light-Matter or Something Else?
In the journal Physics Today of May 2021, an article was published on p. 42 “Hybrid Light-Mater States” [1]. It was found in the 1970s that “optical cavities could modify the spontaneous emission of photons from excited atoms (in solid state) by either enhancing it or suppressing it.” But on p. 44, the authors just mentioned that recent findings in condensed matter (solid states) showed that their properties could be modified in cavities without light. This means that even when light was not present there was still a coupling of the cavity mode (without light) with the molecular vibrational transitions of the solid state in the cavity, and this had remarkably strong effects on the chemical reactivity of the solid state. The authors did not offer any explanation of this, but we mean to explain it here.
