Delocalized Excitation Transfer in Open Quantum Systems with Long-Range Interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how long-range interactions and delocalized excitonic states influence energy transfer efficiency in open quantum systems, with implications for designing light-harvesting materials and quantum simulators.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining long-range interacting qubits with a bosonic mode to analyze vibrationally assisted transfer, revealing optimal states and experimental realization in trapped-ion systems.

Findings

Delocalized excitonic states maximize transfer rate.

Entanglement is preserved during dissipative transfer.

Transfer efficiency depends on disorder, noise, and temperature.

Abstract

The interplay between coherence and system-environment interactions is at the basis of a wide range of phenomena, from quantum information processing to charge and energy transfer in molecular systems, biomolecules, and photochemical materials. In this work, we use a Frenkel exciton model with long-range interacting qubits coupled to a damped collective bosonic mode to investigate vibrationally assisted transfer processes in donor-acceptor systems featuring internal substructures analogous to light-harvesting complexes. We find that certain delocalized excitonic states maximize the transfer rate and that the entanglement is preserved during the dissipative transfer over a wide range of parameters. We investigate the reduction in transfer caused by static disorder, white noise, and finite temperature and study how transfer efficiency scales as a function of the number of dimerized monomers and the component number of each monomer, finding which excitonic states lead to optimal transfer. Finally, we provide a realistic experimental setting to realize this model in analog trapped-ion quantum simulators. Analog quantum simulation of systems comprising many and increasingly complex monomers could offer valuable insights into the design of light-harvesting materials, particularly in the non-perturbative intermediate parameter regime examined in this study, where classical simulation methods are resource-intensive.