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Excitation transfer through open quantum networks: a few basic mechanisms

A variety of open quantum networks are currently under intense examination to model energy transport in photosynthetic systems. Here we study the coherent transfer of a quantum excitation over a network incoherently coupled with a structured and small environment that effectively models the photosynthetic reaction center. Our goal is to distill a few basic, possibly universal, mechanisms or "effects" that are featured in simple energy-transfer models. In particular, we identify three different phenomena: the congestion effect, the asymptotic unitarity and the staircase effects. We begin with few-site models, in which these effects can be fully understood, and then proceed to study more complex networks similar to those employed to model energy transfer in light-harvesting complexes. Our numerical studies on such networks seem to suggest that some of the effects observed in simple networks may be of relevance for biological systems, or artificial analogues of them as well.