Related papers: Vibrational structures and long-lasting electronic…
The present review is devoted to our recent studies on the excitonic motion in photosynthetic systems. In photosynthesis, the light photon is absorbed to create an exciton in the antenna complex of the photosynthetic pigments. This exciton…
Is there a functional role for quantum mechanics or coherent quantum effects in biological processes? While this question is as old as quantum theory, only recently have measurements on biological systems on ultra-fast time-scales shed…
Biochemical oscillations are prevalent in living organisms. Systems with a small number of constituents cannot sustain coherent oscillations for an indefinite time because of fluctuations in the period of oscillation. We show that the…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
The observability of electronic coherence in electron transfer reactions is discussed. We show that under appropriate circumstances large-amplitude oscillations can be found in the electronic occupation probabilities. The initial…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
Recent experiments have used scattering to map the flow of electrons in a two-dimensional electron gas. Among other things, the data from these experiments show perseverance of regular interference fringes beyond the kinematic thermal…
We study transfer of coherent nuclear oscillations between an excitation energy donor and an acceptor in a simple dimeric electronic system coupled to an unstructured thermodynamic bath and some pronounced vibrational intramolecular mode.…
Quantum mechanical phenomena, such as electronic coherence and entanglement, play a key role in achieving the unrivalled efficiencies of light-energy conversion in natural photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes, and triggered the growing…
Biological samples continuously emit ultra-weak photon emission (UPE, or "biophotons") which stems from electronic excited states generated chemically during oxidative metabolism and stress. Thus, UPE can potentially serve as a method for…
Under natural conditions, excitation of biological molecules, which display non-unitary open system dynamics, occurs via incoherent processes such as temperature changes or irradiation by sunlight/moonlight. The dynamics of such processes…
We model the coherent energy transfer of an electronic excitation within covalently linked aromatic homodimers from first-principles, to answer whether the usual models of the bath calculated via detailed electronic structure calculations…
The onset of life is often framed around membrane bound compartments and encoded metabolism, leaving unresolved how spatial organization arose before stable boundaries. In this context, environmental gradients are usually treated as…
Currently, molecular tunnel junctions are recognized as important active elements of various nanodevices. This gives a strong motivation to study physical mechanisms controlling electron transport through molecules. Electron motion through…
Coherent superposition of electronic states, created by ionizing a molecule, can initiate ultrafast dynamics of the electron density. Correlation between nuclear and electron motions, however, typically dissipates the electronic coherence…
Exposing a molecule to intense light pulses may bring this molecule to a nonstationary quantum state, thus launching correlated dynamics of electronic and nuclear subsystems. Although much had been achieved in the understanding of…
We show that the coherence between different bacteriochlorophyll-a (BChla) sites in the Fenna-Mathews-Olson complex is an essential ingredient for excitation energy transfer between various sites. The coherence delocalizes the excitation…
Physical systems with co-existence and interplay of processes featuring distinct spatio-temporal scales are found in various research areas ranging from studies of brain activity to astrophysics. Complexity of such systems makes their…
Assessing the role of interference in natural and artificial quantum dyanamical processes is a crucial task in quantum information theory. To this aim, an appopriate formalism is provided by the decoherent histories framework. While this…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…