Title: Simulating polaron biophysics with Rydberg atoms,
Abstract: Transport of excitations along proteins can be formulated in a quantum
physics context, based on the periodicity and vibrational modes of the
structures. Exact solutions are very challenging to obtain on classical
computers, however, approximate solutions based on the Davydov ansatz have
demonstrated the possibility of stabilized solitonic excitations along the
protein. We propose an alternative study based on a chain of ultracold atoms.
We investigate the experimental parameters to control such a quantum simulator
based on dressed Rydberg atoms. We show that there is a feasible range of
parameters where a quantum simulator can directly mimic the Davydov equations
and their solutions. Such a quantum simulator opens up new directions for the
study of transport phenomena in a biophysical context.