TY - JOUR
T1 - Studying light-harvesting models with superconducting circuits
AU - Potočnik, Anton
AU - Bargerbos, Arno
AU - Schröder, Florian A.Y.N.
AU - Khan, Saeed A.
AU - Collodo, Michele C.
AU - Gasparinetti, Simone
AU - Salathé, Yves
AU - Creatore, Celestino
AU - Eichler, Christopher
AU - Türeci, Hakan E.
AU - Chin, Alex W.
AU - Wallraff, Andreas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - The process of photosynthesis, the main source of energy in the living world, converts sunlight into chemical energy. The high efficiency of this process is believed to be enabled by an interplay between the quantum nature of molecular structures in photosynthetic complexes and their interaction with the environment. Investigating these effects in biological samples is challenging due to their complex and disordered structure. Here we experimentally demonstrate a technique for studying photosynthetic models based on superconducting quantum circuits, which complements existing experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches. We demonstrate a high degree of freedom in design and experimental control of our approach based on a simplified three-site model of a pigment protein complex with realistic parameters scaled down in energy by a factor of 105. We show that the excitation transport between quantum-coherent sites disordered in energy can be enabled through the interaction with environmental noise. We also show that the efficiency of the process is maximized for structured noise resembling intramolecular phononic environments found in photosynthetic complexes.
AB - The process of photosynthesis, the main source of energy in the living world, converts sunlight into chemical energy. The high efficiency of this process is believed to be enabled by an interplay between the quantum nature of molecular structures in photosynthetic complexes and their interaction with the environment. Investigating these effects in biological samples is challenging due to their complex and disordered structure. Here we experimentally demonstrate a technique for studying photosynthetic models based on superconducting quantum circuits, which complements existing experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches. We demonstrate a high degree of freedom in design and experimental control of our approach based on a simplified three-site model of a pigment protein complex with realistic parameters scaled down in energy by a factor of 105. We show that the excitation transport between quantum-coherent sites disordered in energy can be enabled through the interaction with environmental noise. We also show that the efficiency of the process is maximized for structured noise resembling intramolecular phononic environments found in photosynthetic complexes.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-018-03312-x
DO - 10.1038/s41467-018-03312-x
M3 - Article
C2 - 29500345
AN - SCOPUS:85042757108
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 9
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 904
ER -