Date:
Tue, 27/06/201712:00-13:30
Location:
Danciger B building, Seminar room
Lecturer: Dr. Eli Megidish
Affiliation: The University of California, Berkeley
Abstract:
Charge and energy transfer are essential to many important processes in chemistry, biology and emerging nanotechnologies. Such transfer processes often occur in noisy thermal environments that strongly modify the transfer dynamics and, in some cases, even improve the transport efficiency or robustness. A prominent example is the energy transfer from pigments in light-harvesting complexes towards reaction centers, where efficiency is believed to critically depend on the spectral properties of the environment. In many cases, especially for structured, mesoscopic molecular environments, such noise – (or environmentally-) assisted transport processes are difficult to study analytically and numerically. Here we pursue a quantum simulation approach in which the phenomenon can be isolated and studied under fully-controlled conditions. We encode a noise-assisted transport process in a trapped-ion quantum simulator where energy transfer between ions is enhanced when coupled to their thermal vibrational motion. We observe transfer processes wherein the environment changes by an integer number of motional quanta. With the environment prepared near the ground state, we observe oscillatory energy transfer dynamics, indicating the non-Markovian nature of the environment. We demonstrate the ability to tune our quantum simulator into the non-perturbative parameter regimes often encountered in models of biochemical processes for which approximation methods fail.
Affiliation: The University of California, Berkeley
Abstract:
Charge and energy transfer are essential to many important processes in chemistry, biology and emerging nanotechnologies. Such transfer processes often occur in noisy thermal environments that strongly modify the transfer dynamics and, in some cases, even improve the transport efficiency or robustness. A prominent example is the energy transfer from pigments in light-harvesting complexes towards reaction centers, where efficiency is believed to critically depend on the spectral properties of the environment. In many cases, especially for structured, mesoscopic molecular environments, such noise – (or environmentally-) assisted transport processes are difficult to study analytically and numerically. Here we pursue a quantum simulation approach in which the phenomenon can be isolated and studied under fully-controlled conditions. We encode a noise-assisted transport process in a trapped-ion quantum simulator where energy transfer between ions is enhanced when coupled to their thermal vibrational motion. We observe transfer processes wherein the environment changes by an integer number of motional quanta. With the environment prepared near the ground state, we observe oscillatory energy transfer dynamics, indicating the non-Markovian nature of the environment. We demonstrate the ability to tune our quantum simulator into the non-perturbative parameter regimes often encountered in models of biochemical processes for which approximation methods fail.