Highly efficient energy excitation transfer in light-harvesting complexes: The fundamental role of n

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

560 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Excitation transfer through interacting systems plays an important role in many areas of physics, chemistry, and biology. The uncontrollable interaction of the transmission network with a noisy environment is usually assumed to deteriorate its transport capacity, especially so when the system is fundamentally quantum mechanical. Here we identify key mechanisms through which noise such as dephasing, perhaps counter intuitively, may actually aid transport through a dissipative network by opening up additional pathways for excitation transfer. We show that these are processes that lead to the inhibition of destructive interference and exploitation of line broadening effects. We illustrate how these mechanisms operate on a fully connected network by developing a powerful analytical technique that identifies the invariant (excitation trapping) subspaces of a given Hamiltonian. Finally, we show how these principles can explain the remarkable efficiency and robustness of excitation energy transfer from the light-harvesting chlorosomes to the bacterial reaction center in photosynthetic complexes and present a numerical analysis of excitation transport across the Fenna-Matthew-Olson (FMO) complex together with a brief analysis of its entanglement properties. Our results show that, in general, it is the careful interplay of quantum mechanical features and the unavoidable environmental noise that will lead to an optimal system performance.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e54355cf8fc776390f535f55a036ac7bc635bcf6

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum channels and memory effects (2012, background): “…et al., 2011; Vats, John and Busch, 2002), and in the soft matter framework as the case of exciton dynamics surrounded by their protein environment (Caruso et al., 2009; Caruso, Huelga and Plenio, 2010; Plenio and Huelga, 2008; Rebentrost, Chakraborty and Aspuru-Guzik, 2009; Thorwart et al., 2009).”
Long-lived quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes at physiological temperature (2010, background): “(6) and Plenio and Huelga (7) have independently shown that the delicate interplay between quantum coherence and dephasing can create fast and unidirectional transfer pathways within these complexes, resulting in highly efficient electronic energy transfer (8, 9, 19).”
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.”
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].”
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;…”
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].”
Vibrations, quanta and biology (2013, methodology): “We will later see that there are a number of additional mechanisms in which noise and coherent dynamics coexist to lead to similar conclusions [62, 79].”