Steady-State Analysis of Light-harvesting Energy Transfer Driven by Incoherent Light: From Dimers to Networks

Abstract

The question of how quantum coherence facilitates energy transfer has been intensively debated in the scientific community. Since natural and artificial light-harvesting units operate under the stationary condition, we address this question via a nonequilibrium steady-state analysis of a molecular dimer irradiated by incoherent sunlight and then generalize the key predictions to arbitrarily-complex exciton networks.

Quantum versus classical transport of energy in coupled two-level systems

“…For example, in [43] nonclassicality is characterized by the violation of the Legget-Garg inequality and in [44,45] by the distance with respect to a set of classical states. Given the importance of transport for quantum technologies and biological molecular systems presenting quantum coherence [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]46], we believe our approach to characterize nonclassicality based on a resource theory for quantum operations [6] will help to shed some light on the implications of quantum dynamics for transport.…”

“…Examples of coupled systems where nonclassical phenomena are relevant to energy transfer are numerous, including highly complex systems strongly coupled to their environment such as molecular aggregates in photosynthetic complexes [11,12] and polymeric samples [13]. Since the seminal work reporting the experimental observation of quantum dynamics in the energy transport inside a given photosynthetic complex [14], the number of studies dedicated to the quantum description of transport has sharply increased [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Here, we aim to shed some light on the relationship between the phenomenon of energy transfer in coupled two-level quantum systems and resources such as coherence [5] and quantum invasiveness [6].…”