Videos

Environment-assisted quantum transport in photosynthetic complexes: Learning from nature for potential organic photovoltaic applications.

Presenter
November 1, 2008
Keywords:
  • Quantum
MSC:
  • 81-XX
Abstract
Transport phenomena at the nanoscale are of interest due to the presence of both quantum and classical behavior. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum transport efficiency can be enhanced by a dynamical interplay of the system Hamiltonian with the pure dephasing dynamics induced by a fluctuating environment. This is in contrast to fully coherent hopping that leads to localization in disordered systems, and to highly incoherent transfer that is eventually suppressed by the quantum Zeno effect. We study these phenomena in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson protein complex as a prototype for larger photosynthetic energy transfer systems. We also show that disordered binary tree structures exhibit enhanced transport in the presence of dephasing. This phenomena could in principle be applied for the development of materials with improved exciton transport properties. Our group is beginning work in this direction. If time is available, I will describe our distributed computing effort for finding novel candidates for organic photovoltaic devices by the harnessing volunteer CPU time.