title: Disorder and dephasing as control knobs for light transport in optical fiber cavity networks.
abstract: Transport phenomena represent a very interdisciplinary topic with applications in many fields of science, such as physics, chemistry, and biology. In this context, the possibility to design a perfectly controllable experimental setup, where to tune and optimize its dynamics parameters, is a challenging but very relevant task to emulate, for instance, the transmission of energy in light harvesting processes. Here, we experimentally build a scalable and controllable transport emulator based on optical fiber cavity networks where the system noise parameters can be finely tuned while maximizing the transfer efficiency. In particular, we demonstrate that disorder and dephasing noise are two control knobs allowing one to play with constructive and destructive interference to optimize the transport paths towards an exit site. These optical setups, on one side, mimic the transport dynamics in natural photosynthetic organisms and, on the other, are very promising platforms to artificially design optimal nanoscale structures for novel, more efficient, clean energy technologies.
authors.affiliation: CNR-INO, National Institute of Optics, Largo Fermi 6, I-50125 Firenze, Italy.|LENS, European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, University of Florence, via N. Carrara 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
authors.forename: Silvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Viciani
authors.affiliation: LENS, European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, University of Florence, via N. Carrara 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.|QSTAR and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Florence, via G. Sansone 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.|INFN and Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, via S. Marta 3, I-50139 Florence, Italy.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gherardini
authors.affiliation: CNR-INO, National Institute of Optics, Largo Fermi 6, I-50125 Firenze, Italy.|LENS, European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, University of Florence, via N. Carrara 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
authors.forename: Manuela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lima
authors.affiliation: CNR-INO, National Institute of Optics, Largo Fermi 6, I-50125 Firenze, Italy.|LENS, European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, University of Florence, via N. Carrara 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bellini
authors.affiliation: LENS, European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, University of Florence, via N. Carrara 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.|QSTAR and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Florence, via G. Sansone 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
authors.forename: Filippo
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Caruso