Disorder-Enhanced and Disorder-Independent Transport with Long-Range Hopping: Application to Molecular Chains in Optical Cavities

TL;DR

This paper reveals that long-range hopping in disordered nanosystems can lead to regimes where transport efficiency is enhanced by disorder and becomes independent of it, with potential applications in molecular wires within optical cavities.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of disorder-enhanced and disorder-independent transport regimes enabled by long-range hopping in nanosystems, supported by theoretical and experimental relevance.

Findings

Disorder initially suppresses transport efficiency exponentially.

Long-range hopping induces a regime where disorder enhances transport.

Disorder-independent transport persists over several orders of disorder magnitude.

Abstract

Overcoming the detrimental effect of disorder at the nanoscale is very hard since disorder induces localization and an exponential suppression of transport efficiency. Here we unveil novel and robust quantum transport regimes achievable in nanosystems by exploiting long-range hopping. We demonstrate that in a 1D disordered nanostructure in the presence of long-range hopping, transport efficiency, after decreasing exponentially with disorder at first, is then enhanced by disorder [disorder-enhanced transport (DET) regime] until, counterintuitively, it reaches a disorder-independent transport (DIT) regime, persisting over several orders of disorder magnitude in realistic systems. To enlighten the relevance of our results, we demonstrate that an ensemble of emitters in a cavity can be described by an effective long-range Hamiltonian. The specific case of a disordered molecular wire placed in an optical cavity is discussed, showing that the DIT and DET regimes can be reached with state-of-the-art experimental setups.