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Atomic Force Microscopy of Red-Light Photoreceptors Using PeakForce Quantitative Nanomechanical Property Mapping
Published on: October 24, 2014
Decoherence dynamics of coherent electronic excited states in the photosynthetic purple bacterium Rhodobacter
Xian-Ting Liang1, Wei-Min Zhang, Yi-Zhong Zhuo
1Department of Physics and Institute of Modern Physics, Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315211, China. xtliang@ustc.edu
Abstract:
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 [Science 316, 1462 (2007)]. As a successive two-color laser pulses with selected frequencies cast on a sample of the photosynthetic purple bacterium Rb. sphaeroides two resonant excitations of electrons in chromophores can be generated. However, this effective two-level subsystem will interact with its protein environment and decoherence is inevitable. We describe this subsystem coupled with its environment as a dynamical spin-boson model. The non-Markovian decoherence dynamics is described using a quasiadiabatic propagator path integral (QUAPI) approach. With the photon-induced effective time-dependent level splitting energy and level flip coupling coefficient between the two excited states and the environment-induced non-Markovian decoherence dynamics, our theoretical result is in good agreement with the experimental data.
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