Resonant energy transfer enhanced by off-diagonal exciton-phonon coupling

Ning Wu, Zhe Chang, Yang Zhao

Published 2011-03-31, updated 2011-08-03Version 2

Dynamics of resonant energy transfer of a single excitation in a molecular dimer system is studied in the simultaneous presence of diagonal and off-diagonal exciton-phonon coupling. It is found that the off-diagonal coupling plays an important role in the excitation energy transfer process. Coherent transfer can be found at arbitrary temperature for a non-vanishing off-diagonal coupling strength with an oscillation frequency of site populations that increases with the off-diagonal coupling strength. Furthermore, we identify a threshold of the off-diagonal coupling strength below which there exists an optimal temperature that maximizes the total population transfer from the initially excited monomer to the acceptor monomer at long times. As the off-diagonal coupling strength is increased beyond the threshold, however, the optimal temperature is found to abruptly drop to zero.