In the previous example, the coupling of the azobenzene photoisomerization reaction to a cavity was seen to reduce the isomerization quantum yield relative to outside the cavity. However, in another work, the authors showed that one is able to enhance the rate of the photoisomerization reaction (see Fig. ). Here, the azobenzene molecule is confined inside a molecular ring (or host molecule) using a QM/MM level of description with the molecular ring and explicit water solvent treated at the MM level. Both the molecular rings, solvent, and azobenzene are further situated between two gold planar mirrors (Fig. ). This configuration of the simulation closely resembles some actual experiments where a single molecule is coupled to a plasmonic cavity in Ref. 20. In principle, one should be able to experimentally check the prediction of this simulation work. In this calculation, several higher molecular excited states were included, 213 increasing the chemical accuracy of the simulation relative to the simulations that only consider a single electronic excited state. The population dynamics revealed that strong light-matter coupling enhanced the conversion of the trans to cis configurations (Fig. ). In particular, the trans to cis reaction was faster at short times outside the cavity, but the strong light-matter coupling allowed the reaction inside the cavity to persist much longer. This resulted in a steady state cis population nearly twice that of outside the cavity. The proposed mechanism for this photoisomerization rate enhancement is that the photonic |S 0 , 1⟩ state acts as a reservoir for the |S 1 , 0⟩ state population which helps to delay the decay to the ground state before the isomerization can occur. This can be seen in the population dynamics of the diabatic states (Fig. ) where the strong coupling |S 1 , 0⟩ state maintains a large population for longer than the no cavity |S 1 ⟩ state.