Exploiting Structured Environments for Efficient Energy Transfer: The Phonon Antenna Mechanism

A nontrivial interplay between quantum coherence and dissipative environment-driven dynamics is becoming increasingly recognized as the key for efficient energy transport in photosynthetic pigment protein complexes, and converting these biologically inspired insights into a set of design principles that can be implemented in artificial light-harvesting systems has become an active research field. Here we identify a specific design principle, the phonon antenna, by which interpigment coherence is able to modify and optimize the way that excitations spectrally sample their local environmental fluctuations. We provide numerical simulations that suggest that the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex of green sulfur bacteria has an excitonic structure that is dose to such an optimal operating point, and place the phonon antenna concept into a broader context that leads us to conjecture that this general design principle might well be exploited in other biomolecular systems.