We consider a hybrid plasmon-exciton system comprised of a resonant molecular subsystem and three Au wires supporting a dipole mode which can be coupled to a dark mode in controllable fashion by variation of a symmetry parameter. The physics of such
a system under strong coupling conditions is examined in detail. It is shown that if two wires supporting the dark mode are covered with molecular layers the system exhibits four resonant modes for a strong coupling regime due to asymmetry and lifted degeneracy of the molecular state in this case, while upon having molecular aggregates covering the top wire with dipolar mode, three resonant modes appear. Pump-probe simulations are performed to scrutinize the quantum dynamics and find possible ways to control plasmon-exciton materials. It is demonstrated that one can design hybrid nanomaterials with highly pronounced Fano-type resonances when excited by femtosecond lasers.
We introduce a non-Hermitian approximation of Bloch optical equations. This approximation provides a complete description of the excitation, relaxation and decoherence dynamics of ensembles of coupled quantum systems in weak laser fields, taking into
account collective effects and dephasing. In the proposed method one propagates the wave function of the system instead of a complete density matrix. Relaxation and dephasing are taken into account via automatically-adjusted time-dependent gain and decay rates. As an application, we compute the numerical wave packet solution of a time-dependent non-Hermitian Schrodinger equation describing the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with a quantum nano-structure and compare the calculated transmission, reflection, and absorption spectra with those obtained from the numerical solution of the Liouville- von-Neumann equation. It is shown that the proposed wave packet scheme is significantly faster than the propagation of the full density matrix while maintaining small error. We provide the key ingredients for easy-to-use implementation of the proposed scheme and identify the limits and error scaling of this approximation.
