Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthetic light harvesting

By Stephan Hoyer, Mohan Sarovar, K. Birgitta Whaley. 2009

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been suggested that excitation transport in photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes features speedups analogous to those found in quantum algorithms. Here we compare the dynamics in these light-harvesting systems to the dynamics of quantum walks, in order to elucidate the limits of such quantum speedups. For the Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex of green sulfur bacteria, we show that while there is indeed speedup at short times, this is short lived (70 fs) despite longer-lived (ps) quantum coherence. Remarkably, this timescale is independent of the details of the decoherence model. More generally, we show that the distinguishing features of light-harvesting complexes not only limit the extent of quantum speedup but also reduce the rates of diffusive transport. These results suggest that quantum coherent effects in biological systems are optimized for efficiency or robustness rather than the more elusive goal of quantum speedup.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67b4628af073b5b27e3342c8d00fdc44f8763b9f

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

  1. Seogjoo J. Jang
  2. Sabre Kais
  3. Fahhad H. Alharbi
  4. Benedetta Mennucci

In Molecular Biology

  1. Seogjoo J. Jang
  2. Sabre Kais
  3. Fahhad H. Alharbi
  4. Benedetta Mennucci

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