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Advanced Quantum Technologies

Noise as a Resource: Experimental Demonstration of Environment‐Assisted Quantum Transport on Quantum Hardware

Lalitha Nallamothula, Victor R. Prybutok

Published Jun 1, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

ABSTRACT Decoherence‐free subspaces (DFS) provide passive protection against collective noise but require spatially correlated dephasing (). Using 59 367 normal modes from the ab initio dataset of Klinger et al. (J. Chem. Phys. 153 215103 (2020)), we compute the spectral density cross‐correlation matrix of the Fenna–Matthews–Olson (FMO) complex and find the spectrally weighted effective noise correlation , confirming independent noise. We demonstrate environment‐assisted quantum transport (ENAQT) on two superconducting processors—Rigetti Ankaa‐3 (iSWAP‐native) and IQM Garnet (CZ‐native)—using circuit depth to control intrinsic hardware dephasing, without engineered noise injection. Implementing the FMO Hamiltonian directly, both platforms resolve the complete ENAQT curve: on Rigetti, efficiency rises from 1% to 58% (57 enhancement, 44) before declining in the quantum Zeno regime; on IQM, efficiency peaks at 70% (42). Reproducibility is confirmed across independent runs on different dates and qubit sets. Cross‐platform agreement establishes that noise‐assisted transport driven by intrinsic hardware decoherence is observable and robust on current gate‐based quantum processors.

DOI
10.1002/qute.70328

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ABSTRACT Decoherence‐free subspaces (DFS) provide passive protection against collective noise but require spatially correlated dephasing (). Using 59 367 normal modes from the ab initio dataset of Klinger et al. (J. Chem. Phys. 153 215103 (2020)), we compute the spectral density cross‐correlation matrix of the Fenna–Matthews–Olson (FMO) complex and find the spectrally weighted effective noise correlation , confirming independent noise. We demonstrate environment‐assisted quantum transport (ENAQT) on two superconducting processors—Rigetti Ankaa‐3 (iSWAP‐native) and IQM Garnet (CZ‐native)—using circuit depth to control intrinsic hardware dephasing, without engineered noise injection. Implementing the FMO Hamiltonian directly, both platforms resolve the complete ENAQT curve: on Rigetti, efficiency rises from 1% to 58% (57 enhancement, 44) before declining in the quantum Zeno regime; on IQM, efficiency peaks at 70% (42). Reproducibility is confirmed across independent runs on different dates and qubit sets. Cross‐platform agreement establishes that noise‐assisted transport driven by intrinsic hardware decoherence is observable and robust on current gate‐based quantum processors.
The way in which energy is transported through an interacting system governs fundamental properties in nature such as thermal and electric conductivity or phase changes. Remarkably, environmental noise can enhance the transport, an effect known as environment-assisted quantum transport (ENAQT). In this Letter, we study ENAQT in a network of coupled spins subject to engineered static disorder and temporally varying dephasing noise. The interacting spin network is realized in a chain of trapped atomic ions, and energy transport is represented by the transfer of electronic excitation between ions. With increasing noise strength, we observe a crossover from coherent dynamics and Anderson localization to ENAQT and finally a suppression of transport due to the quantum Zeno effect. We find that in the regime where ENAQT is most effective, the transport is mainly diffusive, displaying coherences only at very short times. Further, we show that dephasing characterized by non-Markovian noise can maintain coherences longer than white noise dephasing, with a strong influence of the spectral structure on the transport efficiency. Our approach represents a controlled and scalable way to investigate quantum transport in many-body networks under static disorder and dynamic noise.
Abstract Simulating charge and energy transfer in extended molecular networks requires an effective model to include the environment because it significantly affects the quantum dynamics. A prototypical effect known as environment-assisted quantum transport (ENAQT) consists in the enhancement of the transfer efficiency by the interaction with an environment. A simple description of this phenomenon is obtained by a quantum master equation describing a quantum walk over the molecular network in the presence of inter-site decoherence. We consider the problem of simulating the dynamics underlying ENAQT in a digital quantum computer. Two different quantum algorithms are introduced, the first one based on stochastic Hamiltonians and the second one based on a collision scheme. We test both algorithms by simulating ENAQT in a small molecular network on a quantum computer emulator and provide a comparative analysis of the two approaches. Both algorithms can be implemented in a memory efficient encoding with the number of required qubits scaling logarithmically with the size of the simulated system while the number of gates increases quadratically. We discuss the algorithmic quantum trajectories generated by the two simulation strategies showing that they realize distinct unravellings of the site-dephasing master equation. In our approach, the non-unitary dynamics of the open system is obtained through effective representations of the environment, paving the way to digital quantum simulations of quantum transport influenced by structured environments.
Noise is commonly regarded as an adverse effect disrupting communication and coherent transport processes or limiting their efficiency. However, as has been shown for example for small light-harvesting protein complexes decoherence processes can play a significant role in facilitating transport processes, a phenomenon termed environment-assisted quantum transport (ENAQT). We here study numerically and analytically how dephasing noise improves the efficiency of spin excitation transport in a two dimensional lattice with small homogeneous losses. In particular we investigate the efficiency and time of excitation transfer from a random initial site to a specific target site and show that for system sizes below a characteristic scale it can be substantially enhanced by adding small dephasing noise. We derive approximate analytic expressions for the efficiency which become rather accurate in the two limits of small (coherent regime) and large noise (Zeno regime) and give a very good overall estimate. These analytic expressions provide a quantitative description of ENAQT in spatially extended systems and allow to derive conditions for its existence.
Transport phenomena are ubiquitous throughout the science, engineering and technology disciplines as it concerns energy, mass, charge and information exchange between systems.In particular, energy transport in the nanoscale regime has attracted significant attention within the physical science community due to its potential to explain complex phenomena like the electronic energy transfer in molecular crystals or the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) / light harvesting complexes in photosynthetic bacteria with long time coherences.Energy transport in these systems is highly affected by environmental noise but surprisingly not always in a detrimental way.It was recently found that situations exist where noise actually enhances the transport phenomena.Such noise can take many forms, but can be characterised in three basic behaviours: quantum, correlation in time, or space.All have been shown potential to offer an energy transport enhancement.The focus of this work is on quantum transport caused by stochastic environment with spatio-temporal correlation.We consider a multi-site nearest neighbour interaction model with pure dephasing environmental noise with spatio-temporal correlation and show how an accelerated rate for the energy transfer results especially under negative spatial correlation (anti-correlation).Spatial anti-correlation provides another control parameter to help one establish the most efficient transfer of energy and may provide new insights into the working of exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes.Further the usage of spatio-temporal correlated noise may be a beneficial resource for efficient transport in large scale quantum networks.
Abstract Transport phenomena are ubiquitous throughout the science, engineering, and technology disciplines as it concerns energy, mass, charge, and information exchange between systems. In particular, energy transport in the nanoscale regime has attracted significant attention within the physical science community due to its potential to explain complex phenomena like the electronic energy transfer in molecular crystals or the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO)/light harvesting complexes in photosynthetic bacteria with long time coherences. Energy transport in these systems is highly affected by environmental noise but surprisingly not always in a detrimental way. It was recently found that situations exist where noise actually enhances the transport phenomena. Such noise can take many forms, but can be characterised in three basic behaviors: quantum, correlation in time, or space. All have been shown potential to offer an energy transport enhancement. The focus of this work is on quantum transport caused by stochastic environment with spatio-temporal correlation. We consider a multi-site nearest neighbor interaction model with pure dephasing environmental noise with spatio-temporal correlation and show how an accelerated rate for the energy transfer results especially under negative spatial correlation (anti-correlation). Spatial anti-correlation provides another control parameter to help one establish the most efficient transfer of energy and may provide new insights into the working of exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes. Further the usage of spatio-temporal correlated noise may be a beneficial resource for efficient transport in large scale quantum networks.
Environment-assisted quantum transport (ENAQT) is a unique situation where environmental noise can, counterintuitively, enhance the transport of an open quantum system. In this paper, we investigate how the presence of a one-dimensional single-particle mobility edge can generate strong ENAQT. For this purpose, we study the energy current of a generalized Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper tight binding model coupled at its edges to spin baths of differing temperature and dephasing noise along the system. We find that the ENAQT increases by orders of magnitude and depends on the number of localized eigenstates and disorder strength nonmonotonically. We show that this enhancement is the result of the cooperation between population uniformization and localization.