Cavity-Correlated Electron-Nuclear Dynamics from First Principles

The rapidly developing and converging fields of polaritonic chemistry and quantum optics necessitate a unified approach to predict strongly correlated light-matter interactions with atomic-scale resolution. Toward this overarching goal, we introduce a general time-dependent density-functional theory to study correlated electron, nuclear, and photon interactions on the same quantized footing. We complement our theoretical formulation with the first ab initio calculation of a correlated electron-nuclear-photon system. For a CO2 molecule in an optical cavity, we construct the infrared spectra exhibiting Rabi splitting between the upper and lower polaritonic branches, time-dependent quantum-electrodynamical observables such as the electric displacement field, and observe cavity-modulated molecular motion. Our work opens an important new avenue in introducing ab initio methods to the nascent field of collective strong vibrational light-matter interactions.