[Aspuru-Guzik group list] ITAMP lunch seminar - Mei Zhang, Beijing Normal University/ITAMP (Friday 01/30)

Dear colleagues, this week we are looking forward to a talk by Mei Zhang, who is currently a visiting professor at ITAMP. Kind regards, Richard and Swati ITAMP Topical Lunch Discussion Date: Friday, January 30th Time: 12:00-1:30 pm Pizza will be served. Location: B-106 @ Center for Astrophysics (60 Garden Street) Directions: after entering the lobby of the CfA, turn right to enter the hallway of the B building. In the hallway, turn right again, and B-106 is there. Speaker: Mei Zhang, Beijing Normal University/ITAMP (Friday 01/30) Title: Transport of Quantum Excitations via Local and Non-local Fluctuations Abstract: Energy transport in natural light-harvesting systems is extremely efficient. The exact mechanism is still not clear because of the challenge of experimentally distinguishing different interactions inside bio-systems. This challenge, nevertheless, can be subdued in some physical settings where the system hamiltonian and environment influence are separately controllable. Recently, several groups show that the local dephasing plays an important role on the excitation energy transfer in both biomolecules and other quantum open systems. In this work, we studied how the inclusion of non-local fluctuation influences the transport of quantum excitations in a prototypal 1D chain of spin-1/2 particles. We found that the non-local fluctuation introduces incoherent (classical) hopping in addition to dephasing, thus bridges the quantum random walk dynamics with the classical one. --------------------------- Dr. Richard Schmidt Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (ITAMP) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics MS-14 60 Garden St. Cambridge, MA 02138 U.S.A. richard.schmidt(a)cfa.harvard.edu Tel. +1 (617) 496-7610 Fax +1 (617) 496-7668