Hybrid light–matter particles offer tantalising new way to control chemistry

‘People thought what we did was totally wacky,’ recalls Thomas Ebbesen from the University of Strasbourg in France. ‘When we tried to submit [our 2012 Angewandte Chemie] paper,¹ there was one referee report that was very short and simply said: “This is not science, this is science fiction”.’

For many, Ebbesen’s study might indeed sound like make-believe. His team showed it could change the rate and yield of a photoisomerisation reaction by – instead of carrying it out in a beaker – putting it in a small space between two mirrors. The space contained no chemical catalyst, nothing obvious that might make this possible. What the researchers did is tap into the powers of the vacuum field, a weird quantum mechanical soup that surrounds everything.