Environment-assisted modulation of heat flux in a bio-inspired system based on collision model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a hierarchically structured environment influences heat transfer in a bio-inspired quantum system, revealing that environmental couplings can enhance energy transfer efficiency through collision model simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a collision model approach to study environment-assisted heat flux modulation in a bio-inspired quantum system, highlighting the role of structured environments and their couplings.

Findings

Environmental couplings enhance heat transfer.

Non-monotonic relationship between parameters and heat flux.

Structured environment coherence affects energy transfer.

Abstract

The high energy transfer efficiency of photosynthetic complexes has been a topic of research across many disciplines. Several attempts have been made in order to explain this energy transfer enhancement in terms of quantum mechanical resources such as energetic and vibration coherence and constructive effects of environmental noise. The developments in this line of research have inspired various biomimetic works aiming to use the underlying mechanisms in biological light harvesting complexes for improvement of synthetic systems. In this article we explore the effect of an auxiliary hierarchically structured environment interacting with a system on the steady-state heat transport across the system. The cold and hot baths are modeled by a series of identically prepared qubits in their respective thermal states, and we use collision model to simulate the open quantum dynamics of the system. We investigate the effects of system-environment, inter-environment couplings and coherence of the structured environment on the steady state heat flux and find that such a coupling enhances the energy transfer. Our calculations reveal that there exists a non-monotonic and non-trivial relationship between the steady-state heat flux and the mentioned parameters.