Paper detail

An investigation into the energy transfer efficiency of a two-pigment photosynthetic system using a macroscopic quantum model

Despite several different measures of efficiency that are applicable to the photosynthetic systems, a precise degree of efficiency of these systems is not completely determined. Introducing an efficient model for the dynamics of light-harvesting complexes in biological environments is a major purpose in investigating such systems. Here, we investigate the effect of macroscopic quantum behavior of a system of two pigments on the transport phenomena in this system model which interacts with an oscillating environment. We use the second-order perturbation theory to calculate the time-dependent population of excitonic states of a two-dimensional Hamiltonian using a non-master equation approach. Our results demonstrate that the quantum efficiency is robust with respect to the macroscopicity parameter h solely, but the ratio of macroscopicity over the pigment-pigment interaction energy can be considered as a parameter that may control the energy transfer efficiency at a given time. So, the dynamical behavior and the quantum efficiency of the supposed photosynthetic system may be influenced by a change in the macroscopic behavior of the system.