Abstract
Many important chemical and biochemical processes in the condensed phase are notoriously difficult to simulate numerically. Often this difficulty arises from the complexity of simulating dynamics resulting from coupling to structured, mesoscopic baths, for which no separation of time scales exists and statistical treatments fail. A prime example of such a process is vibrationally assisted charge or energy transfer. A quantum simulator, capable of implementing a realistic model of the system of interest, could provide insight into these processes in regimes where numerical treatments fail. We take a first step towards modeling such transfer processes using an ion trap quantum simulator. By implementing a minimal model, we observe vibrationally assisted energy transport between the electronic states of a donor and an acceptor ion augmented by coupling the donor ion to its vibration. We tune our simulator into several parameter regimes and, in particular, investigate the transfer dynamics in the nonperturbative regime often found in biochemical situations.
Highlights
Charge and energy transfer are essential to many important processes in chemistry, biology, and emerging nanotechnologies
In a simple model featuring vibrationally assisted energy transfer, the environment consists of a thermalized vibrational degree of freedom that can assist the exchange of quantized excitations between a donor and an acceptor site [see Fig. 1(a)]
Vibrationally assisted processes are significant when the vibrational modes are almost resonant with the electronic energy differences, typically of order 100–200 cm−1 in photosynthetic systems
Summary
Charge and energy transfer are essential to many important processes in chemistry, biology, and emerging nanotechnologies. In a simple model featuring vibrationally assisted energy transfer, the environment consists of a thermalized vibrational degree of freedom that can assist the exchange of quantized excitations between a donor and an acceptor site [see Fig. 1(a)] These sites exhibit different energies such that transfer only occurs if the excess energy is taken up or provided by the vibration—as such, the environment assists in the transfer process. This model captures the important features of vibrationally enhanced phenomena, such as the dependence of transfer efficiency on the spectral properties and temperature of the environment.
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