Environment-assisted quantum walks in photosynthetic energy transfer.

By Masoud Mohseni, Patrick Rebentrost, Seth Lloyd, A. Aspuru‐Guzik. Journal of Chemical Physics, 2008

1,062 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Energy transfer within photosynthetic systems can display quantum effects such as delocalized excitonic transport. Recently, direct evidence of long-lived coherence has been experimentally demonstrated for the dynamics of the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) protein complex [Engel et al., Nature (London) 446, 782 (2007)]. However, the relevance of quantum dynamical processes to the exciton transfer efficiency is to a large extent unknown. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for studying the role of quantum interference effects in energy transfer dynamics of molecular arrays interacting with a thermal bath within the Lindblad formalism. To this end, we generalize continuous-time quantum walks to nonunitary and temperature-dependent dynamics in Liouville space derived from a microscopic Hamiltonian. Different physical effects of coherence and decoherence processes are explored via a universal measure for the energy transfer efficiency and its susceptibility. In particular, we demonstrate that for the FMO complex, an effective interplay between the free Hamiltonian evolution and the thermal fluctuations in the environment leads to a substantial increase in energy transfer efficiency from about 70% to 99%.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30fd8ab39c7af2d63a95a14442d0f8330b6d6c64

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Citations in the corpus

Anderson localization of entangled photons in an integrated quantum walk (2013, background): “Besides, QWs have also been proposed to analyze energy transport in biological systems [23, 24].”
Modelling of oscillations in two-dimensional echo-spectra of the Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex (2011, background): “Theoretical quantumtransport studies show that the energy transfer in these systems results from a balance between coherent and dissipative dynamics [10, 11].”
Long-lived quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes at physiological temperature (2010, methodology): “Using the Fenna-Matthews-Olson antenna complex (FMO) as a model system, theoretical studies incorporating both incoherent and coherent transfer as well as thermal dephasing predict that environmentally assisted quantum transfer efficiency peaks near physiological temperature; these studies further s”
Delocalized excitons in natural light-harvesting complexes (2018, methodology): “The suggestion of quantum information processing (Engel et al., 2007) motivated new theoretical works (Caruso et al., 2009, 2010; Chin et al., 2010; Mohseni et al., 2008; Palmieri et al., 2009; Pelzer et al., 2012; Plenio and Huelga, 2008; Rebentrost et al., 2009b,c; Sarovar et al., 2010;…”
Search via quantum walk (2006, background): “Assume that M = ∅ .”