Quantum coherent effects in photosynthesis and their quantum simulation
Abstract
Many biological phenomena including avian navigation and photosynthesis manifest quantum coherent effects. In avian navigation, the weak geomagnetic field and spin-dependent chemical reactions are utilized for navigation. As one of the most important energy sources on earth, photosynthesis has always been a point of discussion for scientists. The study of energy transmission in photosynthetic systems can support the design or performance optimization of artificial light-harvesting devices. Currently, the quantum coherent effect has been observed in photosynthetic complexes, and the quantum efficiency of energy transmission in photosynthetic complexes is close to 100%. These important findings prompted many experts in different disciplines to use quantum physical methods to explore the physical mechanism behind the energy transmission in photosynthetic systems and the role of the quantum coherent effect in the exciton energy transmission in photosynthetic complexes. It has been proven that energy transfer in pigment-protein complexes is mainly in the form of coherent energy transfer. Moreover, the importance of the quantum coherent effect in energy transmission has been proven. Furthermore, several researchers have used the quantum coherent effect to improve energy transmission in photosynthetic systems and achieved some progress. For open quantum systems, such as photosynthetic systems, many theoretical methods have been proposed to analyze their quantum dynamics. These theoretical methods can be divided into two categories according to whether they can describe the diagonal term of the system density matrix, namely, coherent and incoherent theories. Moreover, the application conditions of these theoretical methods differ according to their established processes. Recently, with the progress in research, several groups have proposed several quantum simulation methods based on different quantum computing systems, including quantum simulation methods based on nuclear magnetic resonance systems, superconducting quantum circuit systems, and ion trap systems, to analyze the phenomena in photosynthetic systems. Compared with the traditional theoretical calculation methods, these quantum simulation methods have higher computational efficiency and lower computational complexity. This paper mainly reviews the progress in research on quantum coherent effects in photosynthesis and the related theoretical calculation and quantum simulation methods.
