Observation of Noise-Assisted Transport in an All-Optical Cavity-Based Network.

Recent theoretical and experimental efforts have shown the remarkable and counterintuitive role of noise in enhancing the transport efficiency of complex systems. Here, we realize simple, scalable, and controllable optical fiber cavity networks that allow us to analyze the performance of transport networks for different conditions of interference, dephasing, and disorder. In particular, we experimentally demonstrate that the transport efficiency reaches a maximum when varying the external dephasing noise, i.e., a bell-like shape behavior that had been predicted only theoretically. These optical platforms are very promising simulators of quantum transport phenomena and could be used, in particular, to design and test optimal topologies of artificial light-harvesting structures for future solar energy technologies.