Superradiance Transition and Nonphotochemical Quenching in Photosynthetic Complexes

Abstract

We demonstrate numerically that superradiance could play a significant role in nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ) in light-harvesting complexes. Our model consists of a network of five interconnected sites (discrete excitonic states) that are responsible for the NPQ mechanism. Damaging and charge transfer states are linked to their sinks (independent continuum electron spectra), in which the chemical reactions occur. The superradiance transition in the charge transfer (or in the damaging) channel, occurs at particular electron transfer rates from the discrete to the continuum electron spectra, and can be characterized by a segregation of the imaginary parts of the eigenvalues of the effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. All five excitonic sites interact with their protein environment that is modeled by a random stochastic process. We find the region of parameters in which the superradiance transition into the charge transfer channel takes place. We demonstrate that this superradiance transition has the capability of producing optimal NPQ performance.

8 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Environment-Assisted Quantum Transport
• Shot noise and transport in small quantum cavities with large openings
• The Role of Protein Fluctuation Correlations in Electron Transfer in Photosynthetic Complexes
• Non-Hermitian approach for modeling of noise-assisted quantum electron transfer in photosynthetic complexes

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• On Improving the Performance of Nonphotochemical Quenching in CP29 Light-Harvesting Antenna Complex
• Environment-Assisted Quantum Photo-Protection in Interacting Multi-Exciton Transfer Complexes