Abstract

Open quantum system approaches are widely used in the description of physical, chemical and biological systems. A famous example is electronic excitation transfer in the initial stage of photosynthesis, where harvested energy is transferred with remarkably high efficiency to a reaction center. This transport is affected by the motion of a structured vibrational environment, which makes simulations on a classical computer very demanding. Here we propose an analog quantum simulator of complex open system dynamics with a precisely engineered quantum environment. Our setup is based on superconducting circuits, a well established technology. As an example, we demonstrate that it is feasible to simulate exciton transport in the Fenna–Matthews–Olson photosynthetic complex. Our approach allows for a controllable single-molecule simulation and the investigation of energy transfer pathways as well as non-Markovian noise-correlation effects.

Highlights

  • The electronic degrees of freedom are coupled to a finite temperature vibrational environment and the dynamics of the relevant electronic system can be studied by means of open quantum system approaches

  • We have demonstrated that an appropriately designed network of superconducting qubit-resonator design can simulate the coherent exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes, and the effect of a complicated quantum environment

  • Because of the additional complexity of considering the off-diagonal noise most of the nonMarkovian computational methods only take the diagonal noise into the account

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Summary

THE MODEL HAMILTONIAN

We are interested in the dynamics of a finite dimensional system which is linearly coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators. In the following we refer to the system as “electronic system” and to the quantum environment as “phonon bath” or “vibrational environment”. The corresponding total Hamiltonian is written as.

The system
Coupling to the quantum environment
The classical noise approximation
THE SIMULATOR
THE FMO COMPLEX
The system Hamiltonian
Engineering classical noise
Non-Markovian approach
EXPERIMENTAL FEASIBILITY
CONCLUSION
COORDINATE REPRESENTATION OF THE MODEL HAMILTONIAN
ENERGY TRANSFER PATHWAYS FOR THE FMO COMPLEX
ENVIRONMENT-ASSISTED QUANTUM TRANSPORT
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