Oral: Engineering Quantum-Enhanced Light Harvesters

Quantum-mechanical effects can enhance the efficiency of light harvesting. However, some forms of coherent enhancement are sensitive to noise and disorder, making them unlikely to play a role in practical light harvesting, especially in incoherent sunlight [1]. On the other hand, collective effects such as supertransfer are predicted to be more robust to experimental imperfections [2] and are even believed to play a role in photosynthetic light harvesting [3]. Despite the proposed significance of supertransfer, it has never been directly observed, because doing so would requires the ability to turn delocalization on and off, something not possible in molecular systems. Here, we demonstrate that this elusive quantum effect could be directly observed using a quantum device based on a superconducting circuit. Experimental control over the system and its environment would give full tunability over supertransfer. Additionally, we show that the rate of transfer between an aggregate of N donors and M acceptors can scale as O(N²M²), a significant improvement over the previous best known result of O(N²M) [4]. These non-classically enhanced rates could inform the design of future, quantum-enhanced light harvesters.

References

[1] D. M. Rouse, A. Kushwaha, S. Tomasi, B. W. Lovett, E. M. Gauger and I. Kassal, J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 15 (2024) 254.

[2] S. Tomasi and I. Kassal, J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 1 (2020) 2348.

[3] S. Baghbanzadeh and I. Kassal, J.Phys. Chem. Lett., 7 (2016) 3804.

[4] S. Lloyd and M. Mohseni, New J. Phys., 12 (2010) 075020.