2025/07/13 by Victor Berenstein, Berenstein, Victor, Giacomo Valtolina +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.09695
openalex publication_date 2025/07/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The gas-phase hydrogen exchange reaction (HER) is the most fundamental chemical process for benchmarking quantum reaction dynamics. In this Letter, we focus on controlling HER by means of strong light-matter coupling inside a resonant cavity, an approach often called polariton chemistry. In particular, we focus on the isotopic variation of HER involving collisions between molecular hydrogen H2 and deuterium atom D, i.e., H2+D→HD+H. We find that the asymmetry introduced by the different isotopes, despite being small, enables strong cavity-induced modifications of reaction rates. Outside of the cavity the reaction is as usual D+H2→DH+H. However, inside the cavity another type of reactions take place where D+H2→DH+H+Ephoton, where Ephoton=ℏωcav. Our results show that HER is an ideal platform to make a significant step toward closing the gap between theory and experiment in polariton chemistry.