Demonstration of noise assisted transport in a realistic waveguide array

Waveguide arrays have sufficient flexibility to allow for the investigation of the effects of different forms of noise and disorder on excitation transfer in different types of graphs. The interplay between the underlying coherent dynamics, which typically leads to the enhancement or the suppression of certain transport paths, and the incoherent phenomena due to environmental noise is thought to be crucial for the resilient performance of biomolecular networks in charge of distributing energy and transporting charge across mesoscopic regions in both plants and bacteria. It may also play a role in randomized algorithms in quantum computer science. We will investigate the impact of different forms of network structures and trapping to elucidate the conditions required for optimal transport performance for settings ranging from biology to random walks on graphs.