Thermal effects in exciton harvesting in biased one-dimensional systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal effects influence exciton harvesting in biased one-dimensional systems, revealing that increased temperature accelerates energy harvesting especially in disordered chains at low bias strengths.

Contribution

It extends previous low-temperature models to finite temperatures, analyzing the impact of thermal effects on exciton harvesting in both homogeneous and disordered chains.

Findings

Thermal effects become significant at low bias strengths.

Temperature increases lead to faster exciton harvesting.

Disordered systems are more affected by thermal effects.

Abstract

The study of energy harvesting in chain-like structures is important due to its relevance to a variety of interesting physical systems. Harvesting is understood as the combination of exciton transport through intra-band exciton relaxation (via scattering on phonon modes) and subsequent quenching by a trap. Previously, we have shown that in the low temperature limit different harvesting scenarios as a function of the applied bias strength (slope of the energy gradient towards the trap) are possible \cite{Vlaming07}. This paper generalizes the results for both homogeneous and disordered chains to nonzero temperatures. We show that thermal effects are appreciable only for low bias strengths, particularly so in disordered systems, and lead to faster harvesting.