The role of cavity losses on non-adiabatic couplings and dynamics in polaritonic chemistry

We present a non-Hermitian formulation of the polaritonic structure of azobenzene strongly coupled to a photonic mode that explicitly accounts for the fleeting nature of the photon-molecule interaction. This formalism reveals that the polaritonic non-adiabatic couplings that facilitate cis-trans isomerization can be dramatically modified by photonic dissipation. We perform Fewest-Switches Surface Hopping dynamics on the surfaces that derive from our non-Hermitian formalism and find that the polaritonic isomerization yields are strongly suppressed for moderate to large photon dissipation rates. These findings highlight the important role that the finite

lifetime of photonic degrees of freedom play in polaritonic chemistry.