Stephan Hoyer

I work with Birgitta Whaley in the Berkeley Quantum Information & Computation Center. My Ph.D. research is on the role of electronic quantum coherence in photosynthetic energy transfer. Here are a few of the overarching questions I aim to answer:

• What can coherence tell us about photosynthesis?
• Does quantum coherence contribute to biological function?
• Is photosynthesis accessible to tools and concepts from quantum information theory?

Publications

1. S. H. and K. Birgitta Whaley, Inverting pump-probe spectroscopy for state tomography of excitonic systems, J. Chem. Phys. 138, 164102 (2013), arXiv:1209.6625
2. S. H., Akihito Ishizaki and K. Birgitta Whaley, Spatial propagation of excitonic coherence enables ratcheted energy transfer, Phys. Rev. E 86, 041911 (2012), arXiv:1106.2911
3. S. H., Mohan Sarovar and K. Birgitta Whaley, Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthetic light harvesting, New J. Phys. 12, 065041 (2010), arXiv:0910.1847
4. S. H. and David A. Meyer, Faster transport with a directed quantum walk. Phys. Rev. A 79, 024307 (2009), arXiv:0901.1007. Selected for publication in the Virtual Journal of Quantum Information. Mathematica source for Fig. 2.

See my Google Scholar profile.

Selected Talks

1. Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthesis. APS March Meeting 2010, Portland, Oregon, USA (March 2010).
2. Quantum random walks in energy landscapes. Workshop on Quantum Effects in Biological Systems (QuEBS 2009), Lisbon, Portugal (July 2009).

At Swarthmore College, I majored in physics and minored in mathematics. Here are my final projects for each department:

• Undergraduate thesis: Quantum random walk search on satisfiability problems
• Math senior conference paper: Classification of completely positive maps

Recommended blogs:

• Condensed Concepts
• Female Science Professor
• Shtetl-Optimized
• The Quantum Pontiff

Time sinks:

• BoingBoing
• Physics Today News Picks
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• Sociological Images
• Quora