Conventional photocells suffer a fundamental efficiency threshold imposed by the principle of detailed balance, reflecting the fact that good absorbers must necessarily also be fast emitters. This limitation can be overcome by "parking" the energy of an absorbed photon in a dark state which neither absorbs nor emits light. Here we argue that suitable dark states occur naturally as a consequence of the dipole-dipole interaction between two proximal optical dipoles for a wide range of realistic molecular dimers. We develop an intuitive model of a photocell comprising two light-absorbing molecules coupled to an idealized reaction center, showing asymmetric dimers are capable of providing a significant enhancement of light-to-current conversion under ambient conditions. We conclude by describing a road map for identifying suitable molecular dimers for demonstrating this effect by screening a very large set of possible candidate molecules.

Understanding the dynamics of higher-dimensional quantum systems embedded in a complex environment remains a significant theoretical challenge. While several approaches yielding numerically converged solutions exist, these are computationally expensive and often provide only limited physical insight. Here we address the question: when do more intuitive and simpler-to-compute second-order perturbative approaches provide adequate accuracy? We develop a simple analytical criterion and verify its validity for the case of the much-studied FMO dynamics as well as the canonical spin-boson model.

We introduce a new analytical method for studying the open quantum systems problem of a discrete system weakly coupled to an environment of harmonic oscillators. Our approach is based on a phase space representation of the density matrix for a system coupled to a two-tiered environment. The dynamics of the system and its immediate environment are resolved in a non-Markovian way, and the environmental modes of the inner environment can themselves be damped by a wider 'universe'. Applying our approach to the canonical cases of the Rabi and spin-boson models we obtain new analytical expressions for an effective thermalization temperature and corrections to the environmental response functions as direct consequences of considering such a tiered environment. A comparison with exact numerical simulations confirms that our approximate expressions are remarkably accurate, while their analytic nature offers the prospect of deeper understanding of the physics which they describe. A unique advantage of our method is that it permits the simultaneous inclusion of a continuous bath as well as discrete environmental modes, leading to wide and versatile applicability.

We present a novel, counter-intuitive method, based on dark-state protection, for significantly improving exciton transport efficiency through “wires” comprising a chain of molecular sites with an intrinsic energy gradient. Specifically, by introducing “barriers” to the energy landscape at regular intervals along the transport path, we find that undesirable radiative recombination processes are suppressed due to a clear separation of sub-radiant and super-radiant eigenstates in the system. This, in turn, can lead to an improvement in transmitted power by many orders of magnitude, even for very long chains. From there, we analyze the robustness of this phenomenon to changes in both system and environment properties to show that this effect can be beneficial over a range of different thermal and optical environment regimes. Finally, we show that the novel energy landscape presented here may provide a useful foundation for overcoming the short length scales over which exciton diffusion typically occurs in organic photo-voltaics and other nanoscale transport scenarios, thus leading to considerable potential improvements in the efficiency of such devices.

We study trapping of a cold atom by a single vortex line in an extreme type II superconducting chip, allowing for pinning and friction. We evaluate the atom's spin flip rate and its dephasing due to the vortex fluctuations in equilibrium and find that they decay rapidly when the distance to the vortex exceeds the magnetic penetration length. We find that there are special spin orientations, depending on the spin location relative to the vortex, at which spin dephasing is considerably reduced while perpendicular directions have a reduced spin flip rate. We also show that the vortex must be perpendicular to the surface for a general shape vortex.