Cavity Femtochemistry: Manipulating Nonadiabatic Dynamics at Avoided Crossings

Molecular potential energy surfaces can be actively manipulated by light. This is usually done by strong classical laser light but was recently demonstrated for the quantum field in an optical cavity. The photonic vacuum state of a localized cavity mode can be strongly mixed with the molecular degrees of freedom to create hybrid field-matter states known as polaritons. We simulate the avoided crossing of sodium iodide in a cavity by incorporating the quantized cavity field into the nuclear wave packet dynamics calculation. The quantized field is represented on a numerical grid in quadrature space, thus avoiding the limitations set by the rotating wave approximation (RWA) when the field is expanded in Fock space. This approach allows the investigation of cavity couplings in the vicinity of naturally occurring avoided crossings and conical intersections, which is too expensive in the fock space expansion when the RWA does not apply. Numerical results show how the branching ratio between the covalent and ionic dissociation channels can be strongly manipulated by the optical cavity.