Related papers: Structure and efficiency in bacterial photosynthet…
Photosynthetic proteins have evolved over billions of years so as to undergo optimal energy transfer to the sites of charge separation. Based on spectroscopically detected quantum coherences, it has been suggested that this energy transfer…
A remarkable amount of theoretical research has been carried out to elucidate the physical origins of the recently observed long-lived quantum coherence in the electronic energy transfer process in biological photosynthetic systems.…
There are successful applications of the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence to high energy and condensed matter physics. We apply the holographic approach to photosynthesis that is an important example of nontrivial quantum phenomena…
The long-standing problem of nearly perfect photosynthetic yield in some types of bacteria and nearly all kinds of plants despite the interaction with a hot and noisy environment has witnessed quantum optical explanations in the last decade…
In this paper, we present a theoretical description to the quantum coherence and decoherence phenomena of energy transfer in photosynthesis observed in a recent experiment [see Science 316, 1462 (2007)]. As a successive two-color laser…
Why do plants reflect in the green and have a 'red edge' in the red, and should extrasolar photosynthesis be the same? We provide: 1) a brief review of how photosynthesis works; 2) an overview of the diversity of photosynthetic organisms,…
Natural light harvesting systems exploit electronic coupling of identical chromophores to generate efficient and robust excitation transfer and conversion. Dark states created by strong coupling between chromophores in the antenna structure…
The efficiencies of light-harvesting complexes in biological systems can be much higher than the current efficiencies of artificial solar cells. In this paper, we therefore propose and analyse an energy transport mechanism which employs…
In green plants, chlorophyll-a and chlorophyll-b are the predominant pigments bound to light-harvesting proteins. While the individual characteristics of these chlorophylls are well understood, the advantages of their coexistence remain…
A minimal, one-parameter model of the excitonic Hamiltonian for the light harvesting complex of purple bacteria (LH2) based on ab initio calculation of the excitonic energies is proposed. The set of input parameters contains positions of…
We assess how quantum-mechanical effects associated with high-frequency chromophore vibrations influence excitation energy transfer in biological light-harvesting complexes. We begin with a mixed quantum-classical theory that combines a…
Natural organisms such as photosynthetic bacteria, algae, and plants employ complex molecular machinery to convert solar energy into biochemical fuel. An important common feature shared by most of these photosynthetic organisms is that they…
As most biological species, photosynthetic lifeforms have evolved to function optimally, despite thermal disorder and with fault tolerance. It remains a challenge to understand how this is achieved. To address this challenge the function of…
Efficient bacterial chromosome segregation typically requires the coordinated action of a three-components, fueled by adenosine triphosphate machinery called the partition complex. We present a phenomenological model accounting for the…
The observed prevalence of oscillatory signals in the spectroscopy of biological light-harvesting complexes at ambient temperatures has led to a search for mechanisms supporting coherent transport through larger molecules in noisy…
The nature of excited states of open quantum systems produced by incoherent natural thermal light is analyzed based on a description of the generator of the dynamics. Natural thermal light is shown to generate long-lasting coherent dynamics…
Solar cells employing quantum wells can enhance the light absorption but suffer from the difficulty in photogenerated carrier extraction. Here, we analyzed the spectral response and the photocarrier collection mechanism of p-i-n multiple…
We investigate multichromophoric energy transfer allowing for bath-induced fluctuations at different sites to be correlated. As a prototype system we consider a light-harvesting antenna surrounding a reaction center. We show that the…
Answering the titular question has become a central motivation in the field of quantum biology, ever since the idea was raised following a series of experiments demonstrating wave-like behavior in photosynthetic complexes. Here, we report a…
As for many motile micro-algae, the freshwater species Chlamydomonas reinhardtii can detect light sources and adapt its motile behavior in response. Here, we show that suspensions of photophobic cells can be unstable to density…