Effect of 8th Chromophore: A Comprehensive Study of Excitation Energy Transfer in FMO complex

Abstract

The excitation energy transfer (EET) in Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex has been investigated in the presence of realistic inhomogeneous protein environment around different bacteriochlorophyll-a (BChla) sites of a 8-site monomer. We studied the effect of initial coherence and the 8th chromophore on the EET dynamics considering relative orientation of transition dipole moments of all the BChla sites. We choose femtosecond coherent laser pulse to prepare initial coherent superposition state. Our non-Markovian simulation reveals that the initial coherence between excited states of BChla sites accelerate the excitation energy transfer process as compared to initial mixed state. Even more impressively, in the presence of the 8th chromophore, the initial pure state relaxes much faster than in the 7-site monomer. Hence the inclusion of 8th chromophore additionally enhances the EET relaxation.