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arXiv:1810.05825 · Quantum Engineering

Quantum simulation of clustered photosynthetic light harvesting in a superconducting quantum circuit

Ming‐Jie Tao, Ming Hua, Nana Zhang, Wan‐Ting He, Qing Ai, Fu‐Guo Deng

Published Aug 26, 2020• 13 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a method to emulate the exciton energy transfer (EET) of photosynthetic complexes in a quantum superconducting circuit. Our system is composed of two pairs of superconducting charge qubits coupled to two separated high-Q superconducting transmission line resonators (TLRs), respectively. The two TLRs interact with each other capacitively. When the frequencies of the qubits are largely detuned from those of the TLRs, we simulate the process of EET from the first qubit to the fourth qubit. By tuning the couplings between the qubits and the TLRs, as well as the coupling between the two TLRs, we can modify the effective coupling strengths between the qubits and thus study the geometric effects on the EET. It is shown that a moderately clustered geometry supports optimal EET by using exciton delocalization and an energy matching condition. And the population loss during the EET has been trapped in the two TLRs.

DOI
10.1002/que2.53

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We propose a method to emulate the exciton energy transfer (EET) of photosynthetic complexes in a quantum superconducting circuit. Our system is composed of two pairs of superconducting charge qubits coupled to two separated high-Q superconducting transmission line resonators (TLRs), respectively. The two TLRs interact with each other capacitively. When the frequencies of the qubits are largely detuned from those of the TLRs, we simulate the process of EET from the first qubit to the fourth qubit. By tuning the couplings between the qubits and the TLRs, as well as the coupling between the two TLRs, we can modify the effective coupling strengths between the qubits and thus study the geometric effects on the EET. It is shown that a moderately clustered geometry supports optimal EET by using exciton delocalization and an energy matching condition. And the population loss during the EET has been trapped in the two TLRs.
Many biological phenomena including avian navigation and photosynthesis manifest quantum coherent effects. In avian navigation, the weak geomagnetic field and spin-dependent chemical reactions are utilized for navigation. As one of the most important energy sources on earth, photosynthesis has always been a point of discussion for scientists. The study of energy transmission in photosynthetic systems can support the design or performance optimization of artificial light-harvesting devices. Currently, the quantum coherent effect has been observed in photosynthetic complexes, and the quantum efficiency of energy transmission in photosynthetic complexes is close to 100%. These important findings prompted many experts in different disciplines to use quantum physical methods to explore the physical mechanism behind the energy transmission in photosynthetic systems and the role of the quantum coherent effect in the exciton energy transmission in photosynthetic complexes. It has been proven that energy transfer in pigment-protein complexes is mainly in the form of coherent energy transfer. Moreover, the importance of the quantum coherent effect in energy transmission has been proven. Furthermore, several researchers have used the quantum coherent effect to improve energy transmission in photosynthetic systems and achieved some progress. For open quantum systems, such as photosynthetic systems, many theoretical methods have been proposed to analyze their quantum dynamics. These theoretical methods can be divided into two categories according to whether they can describe the diagonal term of the system density matrix, namely, coherent and incoherent theories. Moreover, the application conditions of these theoretical methods differ according to their established processes. Recently, with the progress in research, several groups have proposed several quantum simulation methods based on different quantum computing systems, including quantum simulation methods based on nuclear magnetic resonance systems, superconducting quantum circuit systems, and ion trap systems, to analyze the phenomena in photosynthetic systems. Compared with the traditional theoretical calculation methods, these quantum simulation methods have higher computational efficiency and lower computational complexity. This paper mainly reviews the progress in research on quantum coherent effects in photosynthesis and the related theoretical calculation and quantum simulation methods.
Open quantum system approaches are widely used in the description of physical, chemical and biological systems. A famous example is electronic excitation transfer in the initial stage of photosynthesis, where harvested energy is transferred with remarkably high efficiency to a reaction center. This transport is affected by the motion of a structured vibrational environment, which makes simulations on a classical computer very demanding. Here we propose an analog quantum simulator of complex open system dynamics with a precisely engineered quantum environment. Our setup is based on superconducting circuits, a well established technology. As an example, we demonstrate that it is feasible to simulate exciton transport in the Fenna–Matthews–Olson photosynthetic complex. Our approach allows for a controllable single-molecule simulation and the investigation of energy transfer pathways as well as non-Markovian noise-correlation effects.
We study decoherence in a circuit QED system consisting of a charge qubit and two superconducting transmission line resonators (TLRs). We show that in the dispersive regime of the circuit QED system one TLR can be used as an auxiliary subsystem to realize decoherence-free quantum dynamics of the bipartite target system consisting of the charge qubit and the other TLR conditioned on the auxiliary TLR initially being a proper number state. Our study gives new insight into control and manipulation of decoherence in quantum systems.
Abstract Near-unity energy transfer efficiency has been widely observed in natural photosynthetic complexes. This phenomenon has attracted broad interest from different fields, such as physics, biology, chemistry, and material science, as it may offer valuable insights into efficient solar-energy harvesting. Recently, quantum coherent effects have been discovered in photosynthetic light harvesting, and their potential role on energy transfer has seen the heated debate. Here, we perform an experimental quantum simulation of photosynthetic energy transfer using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). We show that an N-chromophore photosynthetic complex, with arbitrary structure and bath spectral density, can be effectively simulated by a system with log2N qubits. The computational cost of simulating such a system with a theoretical tool, like the hierarchical equation of motion, which is exponential in N, can be potentially reduced to requiring a just polynomial number of qubits N using NMR quantum simulation. The benefits of performing such quantum simulation in NMR are even greater when the spectral density is complex, as in natural photosynthetic complexes. These findings may shed light on quantum coherence in energy transfer and help to provide design principles for efficient artificial light harvesting.
Simulation of open quantum dynamics for various Hamiltonians and spectral densities are ubiquitous for studying various quantum systems. On a quantum computer, only log 2 N qubits are required for the simulation of an N -dimensional quantum system, hence simulation in a quantum computer can greatly reduce the computational complexity compared with classical methods. Recently, a quantum simulation approach was proposed for studying photosynthetic light harvesting [ npj Quantum Inf. 4, 52 (2018)]. In this paper, we apply the approach to simulate the open quantum dynamics of various photosynthetic systems. We show that for Drude—Lorentz spectral density, the dimerized geometries with strong couplings within the donor and acceptor clusters respectively exhibit significantly improved efficiency. We also demonstrate that the overall energy transfer can be optimized when the energy gap between the donor and acceptor clusters matches the optimum of the spectral density. The effects of different types of baths, e.g., Ohmic, sub-Ohmic, and super-Ohmic spectral densities are also studied. The present investigations demonstrate that the proposed approach is universal for simulating the exact quantum dynamics of photosynthetic systems.