Studying Light-Harvesting Models with Superconducting Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a superconducting circuit-based approach to model and study light-harvesting processes, revealing how environmental noise influences excitation transport efficiency in photosynthetic-like systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel superconducting circuit platform for simulating photosynthetic energy transfer with high control and realism, including environmental effects.

Findings

Disordered quantum sites can achieve efficient excitation transport through environmental noise.

Structured noise enhances energy transfer efficiency similar to biological systems.

Superconducting circuits enable scalable and controllable models of photosynthetic complexes.

Abstract

The process of photosynthesis, the main source of energy in the animate world, converts sunlight into chemical energy. The surprisingly high efficiency of this process is believed to be enabled by an intricate interplay between the quantum nature of molecular structures in photosynthetic complexes and their interaction with the environment. Investigating these effects in biological samples is challenging due to their complex and disordered structure. Here we experimentally demonstrate a new approach for studying photosynthetic models based on superconducting quantum circuits. In particular, we demonstrate the unprecedented versatility and control of our method in an engineered three-site model of a pigment protein complex with realistic parameters scaled down in energy by a factor of $10^5$. With this system we show that the excitation transport between quantum coherent sites disordered in energy can be enabled through the interaction with environmental noise. We also show that the efficiency of the process is maximized for structured noise resembling intramolecular phononic environments found in photosynthetic complexes.