Center for Excitonics Seminar Series Announcement The Center for Excitonics is an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences The Center for Excitonics invites you to join us at the next seminar of the 2009 series. Please forward this information on to others who might be interested in attending this and other center seminars. Title: Quantum Effects in Photosynthesis Presenter: Professor K. Birgitta Whaley Organization: Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center Department of Chemistry University of California, Berkeley Date: December 8, 2009 Time: 3:00 - 4:00pm Place: Harvard University 60 Oxford Street Cambridge Center URL: http://www.rle.mit.edu/excitonics Seminar URL: http://www.rle.mit.edu/excitonics/whaley-120809.html Abstract The initial light-harvesting step of photosynthesis is known to be exceptionally efficient, transporting absorbed light energy as electronic excitation to the reaction center with near unity efficiency within a few picoseconds. It was recently shown that this process is accompanied by surprisingly long-lived electronic coherences, which prompted speculation that light harvesting complexes might be robust, evolved quantum processors that operate effectively in a highly decohering environment. I shall present theoretical studies [1,2] of the quantum dynamics of a prototypical photosynthetic light harvesting complex, the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex that address the nature and extent of two characteristic features of quantum processors, quantum speedup and quantum entanglement, in these biological systems with the help of both generic model and realistic simulations. [1] Mohan Sarovar, Akihito Ishizaki, Graham R. Fleming, K. Birgitta Whaley, “Quantum entanglement in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes”, quant-ph/0905.3787 [2] S. Hoyer, M. Sarovar and K. B. Whaley, “Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthetic light harvesting”, quant-ph/0910.1847 Bio K. Birgitta Whaley is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and co-Director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center. Her research interests include theoretical chemical and quantum physics; quantum information and theory of quantum computation; dynamics of open quantum systems; theory of decoherence; quantum control, quantum nanoscale systems, including trapped cold atoms and molecules, helium droplets, hydrogen clusters, and semiconductor nanocrystals; nanoscale superfluidity; electronic and spintronic properties of semiconductor nanostructures. Whaley received her B.A. in Chemistry from Oxford University in 1978, was a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University (1978–79), and then earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Chicago in 1984. She held research positions at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv University before moving to Berkeley in 1986. She became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002, and was the recipient of the Bergmann Award (1986), the A. P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship Award (1991–93), an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist appointment (1996–97; 2004), and a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Professor appointment at the University of California, Berkeley (2002–03). She has authored over 160 scientific papers, with recent emphasis on helium cluster dynamics and topics in quantum information, control and computation. recent emphasis on helium cluster dynamics and topics in quantum information, control and computation. ergydrade, J.L Alonso, Pablo Echenique, L. Wirtz, A. Marini, M. Gruning, C. Rozzi, D. Varsano and E.K.U. Gross.