Design Principles for Long-Range Energy Transfer at Room Temperature

Under physiological conditions, ballistic long-range transfer of electronic excitations in molecular aggregates is generally expected to be suppressed by noise and dissipative processes. Hence, quantum phenomena are not considered relevant for the design efficient controllable energy over significant length time scales. Contrary this conventional wisdom, here we show that robust properties small configurations repeating clusters molecules can used tune mechanism take place on much larger With support an exactly solvable model, demonstrate coherent exciton delocalization dark states within unit cells harness varying nature (thermalization, fluorescence, non-radiative decay weak inter-site correlations) classical propagation macroscopic distances. In particular, argue just a few pigments drastically alter dissipation pathways which influence mechanism, thus serve as control tool large-scale materials. Building these principles, use extensive numerical simulations they explain currently understood measurements micron-scale diffusion nano-fabricated arrays bacterial photosynthetic complexes. Based results provide guidelines at scale optimize both speed range distances artificial light-harvesting architectures.