Thursday, July 8, 2010

Disentangling extraordinary claims about photosynthesis

It addresses some important issues that have been discussed (ranted about?) on this blog before. Here is a good paragraph:
The fact that exciton states may be delocalized among chromophores is obviously interesting and implies quantum communication between them, provided it survives decoherence effects due to the surrounding medium. One could then justifiably argue that the chromophores are entangled and that the dynamics is profoundly quantum in nature. However, as shown here, these quantum effects can be easily eliminated by basing the description on the delocalized exciton modes.
This paper is a concrete realisation of a point Shaul made at a Workshop on Quantum Efficiency in the Black Forest last year.
I thank Seth Olsen for bringing the paper to my attention.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the link to the interesting paper.

    I'm not an expert in these classical oscillator models, but could we not remove quantum effects even in the double excitation manifold by simply modeling the system with an additional N(N-1)/2 classical oscillators?

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