Researchers from CIC nanoGUNE BRTA (San Sebastian, Spain), in collaboration with the Donostia International Physics Center (San Sebastián, Spain) and the University of Oviedo (Spain) employed a spectroscopic nanoimaging technique to study how infrared nanolight - in form of phonon polaritons - and molecular vibrations interact with each other. The images reveal that vibrational strong coupling can be achieved, which is a phenomenon that recently attracts wide attention for its potential use to control fundamental physical and chemical material properties. The result could lead the development of a novel platform for on-chip chemical identification of tiny amounts of molecules and for studying fundamental aspects of strong coupling phenomena on the nanometer scale. The work has been published in Nature Photonics (DOI: 10.1038/s41566-020-00725-3).
