Dephasing assisted transport: Quantum networks and biomolecules

Abstract

Transport phenomena are fundamental in Physics. They allow for information and energy to be exchanged between individual constituents of communication systems, networks or even biological entities. Environmental noise will generally hinder the efficiency of the transport process. However, and contrary to intuition, there are situations in classical systems where thermal fluctuations are actually instrumental in assisting transport phenomena. Here we show that, even at zero temperature, transport of excitations across dissipative quantum networks can be enhanced by local dephasing noise. We explain the underlying physical mechanisms behind this phenomenon, show that entanglement does not play a supportive role and propose possible experimental demonstrations in quantum optics. We argue that Nature may be routinely exploiting this effect and show that the transport of excitations in light harvesting molecules does benefit from such noise assisted processes. These results point towards the possibility for designing optimized structures for transport, for example in artificial nano-structures, assisted by noise.

References in corpus (5)

• Coupling Superconducting Qubits via a Cavity Bus
• Strongly Interacting Polaritons in Coupled Arrays of Cavities
• Quantum phase transitions of light
• Photon blockade induced Mott transitions and XY spin models in coupled cavity arrays
• Control-limited perfect state transfer, quantum stochastic resonance and many-body entangling gate in imperfect qubit registers

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Environment-Assisted Quantum Transport
• Highly efficient energy excitation transfer in light-harvesting complexes: The fundamental role of noise-assisted transport
• Role of quantum coherence in chromophoric energy transport
• Correlation-dependent coherent to incoherent transitions in resonant energy transfer dynamics
• Stochastic resonance phenomena in spin chains
• State Transfer in Highly Connected Networks and a Quantum Babinet Principle
• Reexamination of decoherence in quantum walks on the hypercube