36 research outputs found
Highly-efficient noise-assisted energy transport in classical oscillator systems
Photosynthesis is a biological process that involves the highly-efficient
transport of energy captured from the sun to a reaction center, where
conversion into useful biochemical energy takes place. Even though one can
always use a quantum perspective to describe any physical process, since
everything follows the laws of Quantum Mechanics, is the use of quantum theory
imperative to explain this high efficiency? Making use of the quantum-classical
correspondence of electronic energy transfer recently introduced by Eisfeld and
Briggs [Phys. Rev. E 85, 046118 (2012)], we show here that the highly-efficient
noise-assisted energy transport described by Rebentrost et al. [New J. Phys.
11, 033003 (2009)], and Plenio and Huelga [New J. Phys. 10, 113019 (2008)], as
the result of the interplay between the quantum coherent evolution of the
photosynthetic system and noise introduced by its surrounding environment, it
can be found as well in purely classical systems. The wider scope of
applicability of the enhancement of energy transfer assisted by noise might
open new ways for developing new technologies aimed at enhancing the efficiency
of a myriad of energy transfer systems, from information channels in
micro-electronic circuits to long-distance high-voltage electrical lines.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Coherent delocalization: Views of entanglement in different scenarios
The concept of entanglement was originally introduced to explain correlations
existing between two spatially separated systems, that cannot be described
using classical ideas. Interestingly, in recent years, it has been shown that
similar correlations can be observed when considering different degrees of
freedom of a single system, even a classical one. Surprisingly, it has also
been suggested that entanglement might be playing a relevant role in certain
biological processes, such as the functioning of pigment-proteins that
constitute light-harvesting complexes of photosynthetic bacteria. The aim of
this work is to show that the presence of entanglement in all of these
different scenarios should not be unexpected, once it is realized that the very
same mathematical structure can describe all of them. We show this by
considering three different, realistic cases in which the only condition for
entanglement to exist is that a single excitation is coherently delocalized
between the different subsystems that compose the system of interest
PT-symmetry from Lindblad dynamics in a linearized optomechanical system
We analyze a lossy linearized optomechanical system in the red-detuned regime under the rotating wave approximation. This so-called optomechanical state transfer protocol provides effective lossy frequency converter (quantum beam-splitter-like) dynamics where the strength of the coupling between the electromagnetic and mechanical modes is controlled by the optical steady-state amplitude. By restricting to a subspace with no losses, we argue that the transition from mode-hybridization in the strong coupling regime to the damped-dynamics in the weak coupling regime, is a signature of the passive parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking transition in the underlying non-Hermitian quantum dimer. We compare the dynamics generated by the quantum open system (Langevin or Lindblad) approach to that of the PT-symmetric Hamiltonian, to characterize the cases where the two are identical. Additionally, we numerically explore the evolution of separable and correlated number states at zero temperature as well as thermal initial state evolution at room temperature. Our results provide a pathway for realizing non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in optomechanical systems at a quantum level