Physics – Quantum Physics
Scientific paper
2011-04-25
Physics
Quantum Physics
28 pages, 29 figures
Scientific paper
Today, the physical principles for the high efficiency of excitation energy transfer in light-harvesting complexes are still not fully understood. Notably, the degree of robustness of these systems for transporting energy is not known considering their realistic interactions with vibrational and radiative environments within the surrounding solvent and scaffold proteins. In this work, we employ an efficient technique to simulate ultrafast quantum dynamics of such complex excitonic systems in their non-equilibrium environment in the non-perturbative and non-Markovian regimes. We demonstrate that the natural dynamics of the FMO complex leads to optimum and stable energy transport due to a convergence of energy/time scales among important internal and external parameters. In particular, we show that the FMO energy transfer efficiency is optimal and robust with respect to all the relevant parameters of environmental interactions and Frenkel-exciton Hamiltonian including reorganization energy \lambda, bath frequency cutoff \gamma, temperature T, bath spatial correlations, initial excitations, dissipation rate, trapping rate, disorders, and dipole moments orientations. We identify the ratio of \lambda T/\gamma\*g as a single key parameter governing quantum transport efficiency, where g is the average excitonic energy gap. Moreover, we explore energy transport in other disordered light-harvesting configurations beyond FMO geometry consisting of up to 20 chromophores. In particular, for random configurations embedded in spatial dimensions of 30 A and 50 A, we observe that the transport efficiency saturates to its maximum value if the systems contain 7 and 14 chromophores respectively. Remarkably, these optimum values coincide with the number of chlorophylls in FMO and LHCII monomers, respectively, suggesting a potential natural optimization with respect to the number of chromophores.
Lloyd Seth
Mohseni Masoud
Rabitz Herschel
Shabani Alireza
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