Maxim Sukharev
The ultrafast nonlinear optical response of molecular ensembles is fundamentally altered under strong light-matter coupling. To rigorously isolate the genuine many-body contributions, an exact time-domain field-subtraction protocol is developed within a fully nonperturbative Maxwell-Liouville framework explicitly incorporating the two-exciton manifold in real space and time. This approach reveals that while collective cavity delocalization drives the macroscopic nonlinear signal toward a severe harmonic cancellation (an effect termed "spectral starvation"), intrinsic many-body molecular interactions robustly resurrect genuine polaritonic double-quantum coherences. This many-body resurrection is governed by a universal two-photon matching rule, Δ_{B}+4J=Ω_{R}, linking molecular anharmonicity (Δ_{B}) to the macroscopic Rabi splitting (Ω_{R}) and excitonic coupling (J). Crucially, this resonance exploits the spatial mismatch between macroscopic polaritons and localized two-exciton pairs to break harmonic cancellation. For J aggregates (J<0), this condition uniquely isolates the resonant many-body state below the dense manifold of localized dark states, protecting the macroscopic coherence from spatial fragmentation. This predictive framework establishes a direct phase diagram to engineer and protect optical nonlinearities across diverse strongly coupled platforms.