Energy transfer in $N$-component nanosystems enhanced by pulse-driven vibronic many-body entanglement

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that pulse-driven vibronic entanglement in nanosystems enhances energy transfer efficiency, with entanglement strength increasing as the number of components grows, revealing new quantum effects in ultrafast nanoscale dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal, dynamic model for pulse-driven energy transfer in N-component nanosystems, highlighting the role of vibronic entanglement beyond traditional approximations.

Findings

Pulse duration influences entanglement generation.

Entangled vibronic states spread energy maximally.

Entanglement robustness increases with system size.

Abstract

The processing of energy by transfer and redistribution plays a key role in the evolution of dynamical systems. At the ultrasmall and ultrafast scale of nanosystems, quantum coherence could in principle also play a role and has been reported in many pulse-driven nanosystems (e.g. quantum dots and even the microscopic Light-Harvesting Complex II (LHC-II) aggregate). Typical theoretical analyses cannot easily be scaled to describe these general $N$-component nanosystems; they do not treat the pulse dynamically; and they approximate memory effects. Here our aim is to shed light on what new physics might arise beyond these approximations. We adopt a purposely minimal model such that the time-dependence of the pulse is included explicitly in the Hamiltonian. This simple model generates complex dynamics: specifically, pulses of intermediate duration generate highly entangled vibronic (i.e. electronic-vibrational) states that spread multiple excitons -- and hence energy -- maximally within the system. Subsequent pulses can then act on such entangled states to efficiently channel subsequent energy capture. The underlying pulse-generated vibronic entanglement increases in strength and robustness as $N$ increases.