Speaker
Description
Trapped ions excited to high-lying electronic states, so-called Rydberg ions, combine strongly coupled collective vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom with long-range interparticle interactions. These ingredients enable the quantum simulation of biochemical processes associated with the dynamics of excitons in non-perturbative parameter regimes. The key features of this quantum simulator are electronic state-dependent molecular potential surfaces, which can be strongly coupled. This allows to create and study vibrationally assisted exciton transfer and excitonic relaxation dynamics induced by molecular conformational changes. We illustrate this in a system of three trapped ions, which is amenable to an ab initio treatment. However, given that ion traps can be routinely prepared with hundreds of ions, they can immediately realise scenarios which are inaccessible by current numerical methods.
| Academic level | PhD student |
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