Excitonic Energy Transfer of Cryptophyte Phycocyanin 645 Complex in Physiological Temperature by Reduced Hierarchical Equation of Motion

Abstract

Recently, many researches have shown that even photosynthetic light-harvesting pigment-protein complexes can have quantum coherence in their excitonic energy transfer at cryogenic and physiological temperatures. Because the protein supplies such noisy environment around pigments that conventional wisdom expects very short lived quantum coherence, elucidating the mechanism and searching for an applicability of the coherence have become an interesting topic in both experiment and theory. We have previously studied the quantum coherence of a phycocyanin 645 complex in a marine algae harvesting light system, using Poisson mapping bracket equation (PBME). PBME is one of the applicable methods for solving quantum-classical Liouville equation, for following the dynamics of such pigment-protein complexes. However, it may suffer from many defects mostly from mapping quantum degrees of freedom into classical ones. To make improvements against such defects, benchmarking targets with more accurately described dynamics is highly needed. Here, we fall back to reduced hierarchical equation of motion (HEOM), for such a purpose. Even though HEOM is known to applicable only to simplified system that is coupled to a set of harmonic oscillators, it can provide ultimate accuracy within the regime of quantum-classical description, thus providing perfect benchmark targets for certain systems. We compare the evolution of the density matrix of pigment excited states by HEOM against the PBME results at physiological temperature, and observe more sophisticated changes of density matrix elements from HEOM. In PBME, the population of states with intermediate energies display only monotonically increasing behaviors. Most importantly, PBME suffers a serious issue of wrong population in the long time limit, likely generated by the zero-point energy leaking problem. Future prospects for developments are briefly discussed as a concluding remark.