A classical master equation for excitonic transport under the influence of an environment

Abstract

In a previous paper [Phys.Rev.E 83, 051911] we have shown that the results of a quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic energy transfer (EET) over aggregates of coupled monomers can be described also by a model of interacting classical electric dipoles in a weak-coupling approximation, which we referred to as the realistic coupling approximation (RCA). The method was illustrated by EET on a simple linear chain of molecules and also by energy transfer on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex relevant for photosynthesis. The study was limited to electronic degrees of freedom since this is the origin of coherent EET in the quantum case. Nevertheless, more realistic models of EET require the inclusion of the de-cohering effects of coupling to an environment, when the molecular aggregate becomes an open quantum system. Here we consider the quantum description of EET on a linear chain and on the FMO complex, incorporating environment coupling and construct the classical version of the same systems in the density matrix formalism. The close agreement of the exact quantum and exact classical results in the RCA is demonstrated and justified analytically. This lends further support to the conclusion that the coherence properties of EET in the FMO complex is evident at the classical level and should not be ascribed as solely due to quantum effects.

References in corpus (7)

• Environment-Assisted Quantum Transport
• Highly efficient energy excitation transfer in light-harvesting complexes: The fundamental role of noise-assisted transport
• Atomistic study of the long-lived quantum coherences in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex
• Quantum simulator of an open quantum system using superconducting qubits: exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes
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• Entangled Wavefunctions from Classical Oscillator Amplitudes
• Endurance of quantum coherence due to particle indistinguishability in noisy quantum networks
• Highly-efficient noise-assisted energy transport in classical oscillator systems
• Coherent and incoherent theories for photosynthetic energy transfer
• Quantum Dynamics Simulation with Classical Oscillators
• Dynamical Casimir effect in stochastic systems: photon-harvesting through noise
• A probability current analysis of energy transport in open quantum systems
• An exact mapping between the states of arbitrary N-level quantum systems and the positions of classical coupled oscillators
• Equilibrium Coherence in the Multi-level Spin-boson Model
• Non-Markovian Dynamics in Ultracold Rydberg Aggregates
• Control excitation and coherent transfer in a dimer
• Two-particle four-point correlations in dynamically disordered tight-binding networks
• Rydberg atom arrays as quantum simulators for molecular dynamics
• Two-particle quantum correlations in stochastically-coupled networks