AI and the World's Hard Problems · Physics · arXiv · 2026-10-26
Near-field maps of topological edge states of molecular aggregates
Topological edge states in two-dimensional molecular aggregates are hard to detect with far-field optics, since their transitions are weak and far-field spectra do not show where the excitation sits. The authors show that spatially resolved near-field spectroscopy encodes the full spatial structure of these states in an aggregate with two sublattices of molecules with complex transition dipoles. A convolutional neural network reconstructed the complex expansion coefficients of the eigenstates from the resulting maps, and the reconstruction held up under substantial random noise.