Sent to you via Google Reader What do you conclude from this graph? The graph below (taken from a paper Environment assisted quantum transport by Patrick Rebentrost, Masoud Mohseni, Ivan Kassal, Seth Lloyd and Alán Aspuru-Guzik) shows the calculated efficiency of transport (blue curve) of an exciton through at network in the presence of a dissipative and dephasing environment. The horizontal scale is the magnitude of the dephasing rate. n.b. it is a logarithmic scale and spans 10 orders of magnitude. The vertical line is the estimated dephasing rate at room temperature. To me the curve shows that the efficiency is quite insensitive to the environment, i.e. it is greater than 80 per cent for dephasing rates varying by eight orders of magnitude! In terms of biological functionality I would say that the environment matters little to the efficiency, except when the system couples very strongly to the environment. However, other people interpret this graph in a very different way. In a 2010 paper in PNAS, Sent from my iPhone