Noise-assisted energy transfer in quantum networks and light-harvesting complexes

By Alex W. Chin, Animesh Datta, Filippo Caruso, Susana F. Huelga, Martin Bodo Plenio. 2009

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide physically intuitive mechanisms for the effect of noise on excitation energy transfer (EET) in networks. Using these mechanisms of dephasing-assisted transport (DAT) in a hybrid basis of both excitons and sites, we develop a detailed picture of how noise enables energy transfer with efficiencies well above 90% across the Fenna–Matthew–Olson (FMO) complex, a type of light-harvesting molecule. We demonstrate explicitly how noise alters the pathways of energy transfer across the complex, suppressing ineffective pathways and facilitating direct ones to the reaction centre. We explain that the fundamental mechanisms underpinning DAT are expected to be robust with respect to the considered noise model but show that the specific details of the exciton–phonon coupling, which remain largely unknown in these type of complexes, and in particular the impact of non-Markovian effects, result in variations of dynamical features that should be amenable to experimental verification with current or planned technology. A detailed understanding of DAT in natural compounds could open up a new paradigm of ‘noise-engineering’ by which EET can be optimized in artificial light-harvesting structures.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34fd1ce0bd324945f8faa913154296b8442c2217

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Delocalized excitons in natural light-harvesting complexes (2018, background): “Later works improved these by including the effects of non-Markovian bath (Caruso et al., 2010; Chin et al., 2010; Rebentrost et al., 2009a), 34 correlated bath fluctuations (Rebentrost et al., 2009b), and full consideration of system-bath coupling at the level of HEOM (Sarovar et al., 2010).”
Vibrations, quanta and biology (2013, background): “tive transition rate to such sites and thus block unfavorable transfer paths from being followed [74, 106].”