Giulio Giustieri — Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore #
Optimal coherent energy transfer in structured random networks with sinks #
A class of tight-binding models capturing the main structural features of some natural
light-harvesting complexes has been considered. 
Specifically, we are interested in understanding their transport properties,
since they can be useful in designing biomimetic devices for solar energy absorption.
In such models a ring of peripheral sites is coupled to a sink either directly or through
some intermediate site. The excitation initially present on the ring can be lost into
the sinks and we aim at optimizing the efficiency of such energy transfer
in the presence of disorder, represented by the random energies of the sites.
We will discuss how the competition of such effects as well as the energy structure of
the network can be used to optimize the coherent transfer of the excitation
from the ring into the sink.