Role of coherence in excitation transfer efficiency to the reaction center in photosynthetic bacteria chlorobium tepidum

Abstract

We investigate the effect of coherence to the excitation transfer efficiency (ETE) in photosynthetic bacteria Chlorobium tepidum. We have modelled the monomer of Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex as consisting of eight bacteriochlorophyll-a sites, while explicitly consider reaction center core complex (RCC) as an additional site. With the use of realistic bath spectrum and several dominant vibronic modes in the nonMarkovian master equation, in an effective 9-site model, we have compared the ETE for an initial pure state and an initial mixed state. We observe that the initial pure state relaxes efficiently to increase the trapping at the RCC. We further illustrate that the coherence play a competitive role to block the back transfer of excitation from RCC pigment to FMO complex and hence to maximize the ETE