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During the first steps of photosynthesis, the energy of impinging solarphotons is transformed into electronic excitation energy of thelight-harvesting biomolecular complexes. The subsequent energy transfer to thereaction center is understood in terms of exciton quasiparticles which move ona grid of biomolecular sites on typical time scales less than 100 femtoseconds(fs). Since the early days of quantum mechanics, this energy transfer isdescribed as an incoherent Forster hopping with classical site occupationprobabilities, but with quantum mechanically determined rate constants. Thisorthodox picture has been challenged by ultrafast optical spectroscopyexperiments with the Fenna-Matthews-Olson protein in which interferenceoscillatory signals up to 1.5 picoseconds were reported and interpreted asdirect evidence of exceptionally long-lived electronic quantum coherence. Here,we show that the optical 2D photon echo spectra of this complex at ambienttemperature in aqueous solution do not provide evidence of any long-livedelectronic quantum coherence, but confirm the orthodox view of rapidly decayingelectronic quantum coherence on a time scale of 60 fs. Our results give no hintthat electronic quantum coherence plays any biofunctional role in realphotoactive biomolecular complexes. Since this natural energy transfer complexis rather small and has a structurally well defined protein with the distancesbetween bacteriochlorophylls being comparable to other light-harvestingcomplexes, we anticipate that this finding is general and directly applies toeven larger photoactive biomolecular complexes.

Nature does not rely on long-lived electronic quantum coherence for photosynthetic energy transfer