Dissociation dynamics of a diatomic molecule in an optical cavity

Abstract: We study the dissociation dynamics of a diatomic molecule, modeled as a Morse oscillator, coupled to an optical cavity. In both classical and quantum dynamics simulations, a marked suppression of the dissociation probability is observed for cavity frequencies significantly below the fundamental transition frequency of the molecule. We show that the suppression in the probability occurs when certain key nonlinear resonances in the classical phase space of the molecule disappear, possible only when the dipole function is nonlinear. This study demonstrates the complexity of cavity-molecule vibrational energy transfer in the anharmonic limit and suggests further studies are necessary to understand resonance effects in experiments of vibrational polariton chemistry.