ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Photosynthetic reaction center as a quantum heat engine.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 283 citations in OpenAlex.
- Transcriptomic and metabolomic responses of maize under conventional and biodegradable microplastic stress.iMetaOmics · 2025Article
- Internal State Cooling of an Atom with Thermal Light.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Signature of Quantum Coherence in the Exciton Energy Pathways of the LH2 Photosynthetic Complex.ACS omega · 2023Article
- Spin selection in atomic-level chiral metal oxide for photocatalysis.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Quantum Photovoltaic Cells Driven by Photon Pulses.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Delocalized excitons and interaction effects in extremely dilute thermal ensembles.Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP · 2019Article
- Catalysis of heat-to-work conversion in quantum machines.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- On the performance of a photosystem II reaction centre-based photocell.Chemical science · 2017Article
- Magnetic field enhancement of organic photovoltaic cells performance.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- On thermodynamic inconsistencies in several photosynthetic and solar cell models and how to fix them.Chemical science · 2017Article
- Origin of long-lived quantum coherence and excitation dynamics in pigment-protein complexes.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Quantum Simulation of Dissipative Processes without Reservoir Engineering.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- Lunisolar tidal force and its relationship to chlorophyll fluorescence in Arabidopsis thaliana.Plant signaling & behavior · 2015Article
- Non-classicality of the molecular vibrations assisting exciton energy transfer at room temperature.Nature communications · 2014Article
- Enhanced quantum efficiency of light-harvesting in a biomolecular quantum "steam engine".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
- Suppression of population transport and control of exciton distributions by entangled photons.Nature communications · 2013Article
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4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Two seemingly unrelated effects attributed to quantum coherence have been reported recently in natural and artificial light-harvesting systems. First, an enhanced solar cell efficiency was predicted and second, population oscillations were measured in photosynthetic antennae excited by sequences of coherent ultrashort laser pulses. Because both systems operate as quantum heat engines (QHEs) that convert the solar photon energy to useful work (electric currents or chemical energy, respectively), the question arises whether coherence could also enhance the photosynthetic yield. Here, we show that both effects arise from the same population-coherence coupling term which is induced by noise, does not require coherent light, and will therefore work for incoherent excitation under natural conditions of solar excitation. Charge separation in light-harvesting complexes occurs in a pair of tightly coupled chlorophylls (the special pair) at the heart of photosynthetic reaction centers of both plants and bacteria. We show the analogy between the energy level schemes of the special pair and of the laser/photocell QHEs, and that both population oscillations and enhanced yield have a common origin and are expected to coexist for typical parameters. We predict an enhanced yield of 27% in a QHE motivated by the reaction center. This suggests nature-mimicking architectures for artificial solar energy devices.
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