Assistance of Molecular Vibrations on Coherent Energy Transfer in Photosynthesis from the View of a Quantum Heat Engine

Recently, the quantum nature in the energy transport in solar cells and light-harvesting complexes has attracted much attention as being triggered by the experimental observations. We model the light-harvesting complex (i.e., PEB₅₀ dimer) as a quantum heat engine (QHE) and study the effect of the undamped intramolecule vibrational modes on the coherent energy-transfer process and quantum transport. We find that the exciton-vibration interaction has nontrivial contribution to the promotion of quantum yield as well as transport properties of the QHE at steady state by enhancing the quantum coherence quantified by entanglement entropy. The perfect quantum yield over 90% has been obtained, with the exciton-vibration coupling. We attribute these improvements to the renormalization of the electronic couplings effectively induced by exciton-vibration interaction and the subsequent delocalization of excitons. Finally, we demonstrate that the thermal relaxation and dephasing can help the excitation energy transfer in the PEB₅₀ dimer.