• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.858-864
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• 2014

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.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.933-940
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• 2012

Recently, it has been shown that quantum coherence appears in energy transfers of various photosynthetic lightharvesting complexes at from cryogenic to even room temperatures. Because the photosynthetic systems are inherently complex, these findings have subsequently interested many researchers in the field of both experiment and theory. From the theoretical part, simplified dynamics or semiclassical approaches have been widely used. In these approaches, the quantum-classical Liouville equation (QCLE) is the fundamental starting point. Toward the semiclassical scheme, approximations are needed to simplify the equations of motion of various degrees of freedom. Here, we have adopted the Poisson bracket mapping equation (PBME) as an approximate form of QCLE and applied it to find the time evolution of the excitation in a photosynthetic complex from marine algae. The benefit of using PBME is its similarity to conventional Hamiltonian dynamics. Through this, we confirmed the coherent population transfer behaviors in short time domain as previously reported with a more accurate but more time-consuming iterative linearized density matrix approach. However, we find that the site populations do not behave according to the Boltzmann law in the long time limit. We also test the effect of adding spurious high frequency vibrations to the spectral density of the bath, and find that their existence does not alter the dynamics to any significant extent as long as the associated reorganization energy is changed not too drastically. This suggests that adopting classical trajectory based ensembles in semiclassical simulations should not influence the coherence dynamics in any practical manner, even though the classical trajectories often yield spurious high frequency vibrational features in the spectral density.