Exploiting Structured Environments for Efficient Energy Transfer: The Phonon Antenna Mechanism.
A nontrivial interplay between quantum coherence and dissipative environment-driven dynamics is becoming increasingly recognized as the key for efficient energy transport in photosynthetic pigment-protein complexes, and converting these biologically inspired insights into a set of design principles that can be implemented in artificial light-harvesting systems has become an active research field. Here we identify a specific design principle, the phonon antenna, by which interpigment coherence is able to modify and optimize the way that excitations spectrally sample their local environmental fluctuations. We provide numerical simulations that suggest that the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex of green sulfur bacteria has an excitonic structure that is close to such an optimal operating point, and place the phonon antenna concept into a broader context that leads us to conjecture that this general design principle might well be exploited in other biomolecular systems.
†Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC, Serrano 113-B, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
Marco Del
MD
Rey
‡Theory of Condensed Matter Group, University of Cambridge, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0HE, United Kingdom.
Alex W
AW
Chin
§Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Ulm, Albert-Einstein Allee 11, 89069 Ulm, Germany.|∥Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology, Universität Ulm, Albert-Einstein Allee 11, 89069 Ulm, Germany.
Susana F
SF
Huelga
§Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Ulm, Albert-Einstein Allee 11, 89069 Ulm, Germany.|∥Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology, Universität Ulm, Albert-Einstein Allee 11, 89069 Ulm, Germany.
Martin B
MB
Plenio
emergence; energy matching; exciton dynamics; noise-assisted transport; pigment−protein complexes