Speaker
Description
Energy transfer reactions underpin many light-harvesting processes, and their analog quantum simulation can reveal principles for optimal material design. Trapped ion platforms—noted for their coherence and programmability—map naturally onto charge transfer (CT) and vibrationally assisted exciton transfer (VAET) models by tailoring Hamiltonian interactions between the ions’ native spin and bosonic degrees of freedom, and by tuning their dissipative properties. Building on our recent simulation of a paradigmatic electron transfer model coupled to a single damped bosonic mode [1], we introduce two layers of added complexity. (1) We realize CT and VAET dynamics with two bosonic modes, exposing transfer characteristics absent in the single-mode limit [2]. In a two-level donor–acceptor system coupled to an Ohmic bath, we track nonequilibrium transfer rates as functions of mode degeneracy and vibronic coupling strength. (2) We theoretically extend to a Frenkel exciton model in which long-range interacting qubits are coupled to a damped collective phonon, capturing vibrationally assisted transfer processes in donor–acceptor systems that mimic the internal substructure of natural light-harvesting complexes [3]. Both advances can be implemented natively on a trapped ion simulator through sympathetic cooling and coherent spin-phonon control [1, 2, 4, 5].
[1] Visal So et al. Sci. Adv. 10,eads8011 (2024).
[2] Visal So et al. manuscript in preparation (2025).
[3] Diego Fallas Padilla et al. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.04383. (2025).
[4] Mingyu Kang et al. Nat Rev Chem 8, 340–358 (2024).
[5] Ke Sun et al. Nat Commun 16, 4042 (2025).
