Correlated interaction fluctuations in photosynthetic complexes

Abstract

The functioning and efficiency of natural photosynthetic complexes is strongly influenced by their embedding in a noisy protein environment, which can even serve to enhance the transport efficiency. Interactions with the environment induce fluctuations of the transition energies of and interactions between the chlorophyll molecules, and due to the fact that different fluctuations will partially be caused by the same environmental factors, correlations between the various fluctuations will occur. We argue that fluctuations of the interactions should in general not be neglected, as these have a considerable impact on population transfer rates, decoherence rates and the efficiency of photosynthetic complexes. Furthermore, while correlations between transition energy fluctuations have been studied, we provide the first quantitative study of the effect of correlations between interaction fluctuations and transition energy fluctuations, and of correlations between the various interaction fluctuations. It is shown that these additional correlations typically lead to changes in interchromophore transfer rates, population oscillations and can lead to a limited enhancement of the light harvesting efficiency.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Delocalized excitons in natural light harvesting complexes
• On the alternatives for bath correlators and spectral densities from mixed quantum-classical simulations
• Machine Learning Exciton Dynamics
• Multipartite Quantum Entanglement Evolution in Photosynthetic Complexes
• Transport of quantum excitations coupled to spatially extended nonlinear many-body systems
• Multipartite entanglement in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) pigment-protein complex
• Efficient quantum transport in a multi-site system combining classical noise and quantum baths
• Exciton transport in the PE545 complex: insight from atomistic QM/MM-based quantum master equations and elastic network models