Professor Martin B. Plenio
Department of Physics, Imperial College London
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Ulm
London, UK

Thursday, August 18, 2011
3:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

Recent experiments have provided strong evidence for the existence of quantum coherence in the early stages of photosynthesis. Subsequent theory work shows that the regime of optimal operation would see a system-environment interaction that is comparable to the intra-system coupling strengths and hence so strong that perturbative treatments of the system environment interaction are not valid. Here we present a novel approach to the numerical and analytical study of systems in strong contact with environments made up of harmonic oscillators. This approach works for arbitrary spectral densities and noise strengths and provides a rigorous error bound and provides insights into the nature of irreversible dynamics.