Environmental engineering for quantum energy transport

Abstract

Transport phenomena are ubiquitous throughout the science, engineering, and technology disciplines as it concerns energy, mass, charge, and information exchange between systems. In particular, energy transport in the nanoscale regime has attracted significant attention within the physical science community due to its potential to explain complex phenomena like the electronic energy transfer in molecular crystals or the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO)/light harvesting complexes in photosynthetic bacteria with long time coherences. Energy transport in these systems is highly affected by environmental noise but surprisingly not always in a detrimental way. It was recently found that situations exist where noise actually enhances the transport phenomena. Such noise can take many forms, but can be characterised in three basic behaviors: quantum, correlation in time, or space. All have been shown potential to offer an energy transport enhancement. The focus of this work is on quantum transport caused by stochastic environment with spatio-temporal correlation. We consider a multi-site nearest neighbor interaction model with pure dephasing environmental noise with spatio-temporal correlation and show how an accelerated rate for the energy transfer results especially under negative spatial correlation (anti-correlation). Spatial anti-correlation provides another control parameter to help one establish the most efficient transfer of energy and may provide new insights into the working of exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes. Further the usage of spatio-temporal correlated noise may be a beneficial resource for efficient transport in large scale quantum networks.