Studying Light-Harvesting Models with Superconducting Circuits
A. Potočnik,1 G. Norris,1 S. A. Khan,3 M. C. Collodo,1 S. Gasparinetti,1 C. Eichler,1 H. E. Türeci,3 A. W. Chin,2 A.Wallraff1
1Department of Physics, ETH Zürich, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland
2 Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, United Kingdom
3 Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Quantum transport is a broad field of research studying phenomena in solid-state physics, chemistry, and even biology. In biological systems, the interplay between quantum and classical effects has been suggested to yield highly efficient energy transport in photosynthetic pigment protein complexes. Due to complex structure of pigment compounds and strong coupling to their environments it is extremely challenging to study the dynamics of energy transport in these systems directly. We demonstrate how to study noise-assisted energy transport in an artificial network of two-level systems that are strongly coupled to engineered environments. We mimic a simplified pigment protein complex with three coupled superconducting qubits interacting with an open waveguide through which the system is excited and a low-quality resonator from where the energy is extracted. Our approach allows to test proposed models of various photosynthetic processes and to search for novel quantum transport phenomena in complex networks subject to non-Markovian environments.