A multi-pathway model for Photosynthetic reaction center

TL;DR

This paper models a biological quantum heat engine inspired by photosynthetic reaction centers, demonstrating that multiple charge-separation pathways can enhance efficiency and robustness, informing artificial solar energy device design.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-pathway quantum heat engine model for photosynthetic charge separation, showing how pathway interference improves efficiency and resilience.

Findings

Multiple pathways increase charge separation yield.

Cross-couplings enhance current and voltage.

Robustness against recombination and dephasing is demonstrated.

Abstract

Charge separation in light-harvesting complexes occurs in a pair of tightly coupled chlorophylls at the heart of photosynthetic reaction centers of both plants and bacteria. Recently it has been shown that quantum coherence can, in principle, enhance the efficiency of a solar cell, working like a quantum heat engine (QHE). Here, we propose a biological quantum heat engine (BQHE) motivated by Photosystem {\rm II} reaction center (PS{\rm II} RC) to describe the charge separation. Our model mainly considers two charge-separation pathways more than that in the published literature. The two pathways can interfere via cross-couplings and work together to enhance the charge-separation yields. We explore how these cross-couplings increase the current and voltage of the charge separation and discuss the advantages of multiple pathways in terms of current and power. The robustness of the BQHE against the charge recombination in natural PS{\rm II} RC and dephasing induced by environments is also explored, and extension from two pathways to multiple pathways is made. These results suggest that nature-mimicking architectures with engineered multiple pathways for charge separations might be better for artificial solar energy devices.