Engineering vibrationally-assisted energy transfer in a trapped-ion quantum simulator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a trapped-ion quantum simulator can model vibrationally assisted energy transfer, providing insights into complex biochemical processes where classical simulations are challenging.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal ion trap model to simulate vibrationally assisted energy transfer, exploring regimes relevant to biochemical systems.

Findings

Observation of vibrationally assisted energy transport between ions

Ability to tune the simulator into various parameter regimes

Insights into nonperturbative transfer dynamics

Abstract

Many important chemical and biochemical processes in the condensed phase are notoriously difficult to simulate numerically. Often this difficulty arises from the complexity of simulating dynamics resulting from coupling to structured, mesoscopic baths, for which no separation of time scales exists and statistical treatments fail. A prime example of such a process is vibrationally assisted charge or energy transfer. A quantum simulator, capable of implementing a realistic model of the system of interest, could provide insight into these processes in regimes where numerical treatments fail. We take a first step towards modeling such transfer processes using an ion trap quantum simulator. By implementing a minimal model, we observe vibrationally assisted energy transport between the electronic states of a donor and an acceptor ion augmented by coupling the donor ion to its vibration. We tune our simulator into several parameter regimes and, in particular, investigate the transfer dynamics in the nonperturbative regime often found in biochemical situations.