Suppression of quantum oscillations and the dependence on site energies in electronic excitation transfer in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson trimer

• Main Authors: Ritschel, G, Roden, J, Strunz, W. T, Aspuru-Guzik, A, Eisfeld, A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 28-09-2011
• Subjects: Physics - Biological Physics; Physics - Quantum Physics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1108.3452

J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2, 2912 (2011) Energy transfer in the photosynthetic complex of the Green Sulfur Bacteria
known as the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex is studied theoretically taking
all three subunits (monomers) of the FMO trimer and the recently found eighth
bacteriochlorophyll (BChl) molecule into account. We find that in all
considered cases there is very little transfer between the monomers. Since it
is believed that the eighth BChl is located near the main light harvesting
antenna we look at the differences in transfer between the situation when BChl
8 is initially excited and the usually considered case when BChl 1 or 6 is
initially excited. We find strong differences in the transfer dynamics, both
qualitatively and quantitatively. When the excited state dynamics is
initialized at site eight of the FMO complex, we see a slow exponential-like
decay of the excitation. This is in contrast to the oscillations and a
relatively fast transfer that occurs when only seven sites or initialization at
sites 1 and 6 is considered. Additionally we show that differences in the
values of the electronic transition energies found in the literature lead to a
large difference in the transfer dynamics.