On the Role of Quantum Coherence in Photosynthetic Energy Transfer

Recent experiments have provided evidence for long-lived electronic
coherence in photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes at room
temperature. This talk presents some of the work performed in the
Aspuru-Guzik group on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex. This includes
the basic concept of environment-assisted excitonic transport and a
quantification of the role of coherence by its contribution to the
transport efficiency. We find that, depending on the spatial
correlations in the phonon environment, there is about a 10%
contribution of coherent dynamics to the exciton transfer efficiency. In
addition, we investigate a time-convolutionless non-Markovian master
equation approach and show our quantum chemistry inspired way of
incorporating atomistic detail of the protein environment into the
exciton dynamics.