Efficiency of energy transfer in a light-harvesting system under quantum coherence

By A. Olaya-Castro, Chiu Fan Lee, Francesca Fassioli Olsen, N. Johnson. 2007

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the role of quantum coherence in the efficiency of excitation transfer in a ring-hub arrangement of interacting two-level systems, mimicking a light-harvesting antenna connected to a reaction center as it is found in natural photosynthetic systems. By using a quantum jump approach, we demonstrate that in the presence of quantum coherent energy transfer and energetic disorder, the efficiency of excitation transfer from the antenna to the reaction center depends intimately on the quantum superposition properties of the initial state. In particular, we find that efficiency is sensitive to symmetric and asymmetric superposition of states in the basis of localized excitations, indicating that initial-state properties can be used as an efficiency control parameter at low temperatures.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4bf029f88ff2a94a35e72a69579ac67d6a733526

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Lessons from nature about solar light harvesting. (2011, background): “Nevertheless, coherence presents opportunities for controlling energy transfer in multichromophoric assemblie”