Delocalized quantum states enhance photocell efficiency

Efficient biologically inspired photocell enhanced by delocalized quantum states.

Artificially implementing the biological light reactions responsible for the remarkably efficient photon-to-charge conversion in photosynthetic complexes represents a new direction for the future development of photovoltaic devices. Here, we develop such a paradigm and present a model photocell based on the nanoscale architecture and molecular elements of photosynthetic reaction centers. Quantu...

Symmetry-enhanced supertransfer of delocalized quantum states

Coherent hopping of excitation relies on quantum coherence over physically extended states. In this work, we consider simple models to examine the effect of symmetries of delocalized multi-excitation states on the dynamical timescales, including hopping rates, radiative decay and environmental interactions. While the decoherence (pure dephasing) rate of an extended state over N sites is compara...

Forming delocalized intermediate states with realistic quantum dots

Quantum photocell: using quantum coherence to reduce radiative recombination and increase efficiency.

The fundamental limit to photovoltaic efficiency is widely thought to be radiative recombination which balances radiative absorption. We here show that it is possible to break detailed balance via quantum coherence, as in the case of lasing without inversion and the photo-Carnot quantum heat engine. This yields, in principle, a quantum limit to photovoltaic operation which can exceed the classi...

Creating cat states in one-dimensional quantum walks using delocalized initial states

Cat states are coherent quantum superpositions ofmacroscopically distinct states and are useful for understanding the boundary between the classical and the quantumworld. Due to theirmacroscopic nature, cat states are difficult to prepare in physical systems.We propose amethod to create cat states in one-dimensional quantumwalks using delocalized initial states of thewalker. Since the quantum w...