Dephasing-assisted transport: quantum networks and biomolecules

By Martin Bodo Plenio, Susana F. Huelga. 2008

914 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transport phenomena are fundamental in physics. They allow for information and energy to be exchanged between individual constituents of communication systems, networks or even biological entities. Environmental noise will generally hinder the efficiency of the transport process. However, and contrary to intuition, there are situations in classical systems where thermal fluctuations are actually instrumental in assisting transport phenomena. Here we show that, even at zero temperature, transport of excitations across dissipative quantum networks can be enhanced by local dephasing noise. We explain the underlying physical mechanisms behind this phenomenon and propose possible experimental demonstrations in quantum optics. Our results suggest that the presence of entanglement does not play an essential role for energy transport and may even hinder it. We argue that Nature may be routinely exploiting dephasing noise and show that the transport of excitations in simplified models of light harvesting molecules does benefit from such noise assisted processes. These results point toward the possibility for designing optimized structures for transport, for example in artificial nanostructures, assisted by noise.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Molecular Biology, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5db0b643c58f0eae3d89df3677091d344466b748

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Molecular Biology

In Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems (2015, background): “Because of these relatively long-lasting coherences, pigments involved in this energy transport should be considered in principle as quantum systems (Caruso et al., 2009; Mohseni et al., 2013; Plenio and Huelga, 2008; Rebentrost et al., 2009b) coupled to the surrounding phononic environment.”
Quantum simulations with cold trapped ions (2009, background): “A theoretical study of how dephasing caused by coupling to a nisy environment can actually assist in transferring energy (or information), istead of impeding it, across a network of quantum nodes is presented in [Plenio & Huelga 2008].”
Long-lived quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes at physiological temperature (2010, background): “Plenio MB, Huelga SF (2008) Dephasing-assisted transport: Quantum networks and biomolecules.”
Quantum entanglement in photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes (2009, methodology): “Redfield dynamics have recently been used to study the interplay between coherent dynamics and dephasing on excitation energy transfer in FMO [28, 57].”
Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthetic light harvesting (2009, methodology): “The intuition is that at low levels dephasing allows escape from localization by removing destructive interference, but at high levels it inhibits transport by inducing the quantum Zeno effect [9, 10, 12, 13].”
Light fields in complex media: Mesoscopic scattering meets wave control (2017, background): “…the concepts of quantum networks have been studied, where multiple emitters are distributed and connected for quantum computing or simulations (Plenio and Huelga, 2008; Vedral et al., 1996) as well as to understand quantum phenomena in biology such as photosynthesis (Hildner et al., 2013).”