  Many important chemical and biochemical processes in the condensed phase are
notoriously difficult to simulate numerically. Often this difficulty arises
from the complexity of simulating dynamics resulting from coupling to
structured, mesoscopic baths, for which no separation of time scales exists and
statistical treatments fail. A prime example of such a process is vibrationally
assisted charge or energy transfer. A quantum simulator, capable of
implementing a realistic model of the system of interest, could provide insight
into these processes in regimes where numerical treatments fail. We take a
first step towards modeling such transfer processes using an ion trap quantum
simulator. By implementing a minimal model, we observe vibrationally assisted
energy transport between the electronic states of a donor and an acceptor ion
augmented by coupling the donor ion to its vibration. We tune our simulator
into several parameter regimes and, in particular, investigate the transfer
dynamics in the nonperturbative regime often found in biochemical situations.
