Energy transfer as a random walk with long-range steps

Abstract

We consider the incoherent energy transport in molecular crystals, where the transfer rates stem from Coulombic and exchange interactions. For substitutionally disordered lattices we present in a first passage model the excitation decay due to trapping by randomly distributed traps; the decay is related to the distribution of the number of distinct sites visited during the timet and is expressible through the cumulants of this distribution. The validity domains of approximate decay laws based on the first few cumulants are also discussed. We exemplify the findings for dipolar transfer rates between randomly distributed molecules on a square lattice, by comparing the random walk on the random system to its CTRW (continuous time random walk) counterpart.