  The process of photosynthesis, the main source of energy in the animate
world, converts sunlight into chemical energy. The surprisingly high efficiency
of this process is believed to be enabled by an intricate interplay between the
quantum nature of molecular structures in photosynthetic complexes and their
interaction with the environment. Investigating these effects in biological
samples is challenging due to their complex and disordered structure. Here we
experimentally demonstrate a new approach for studying photosynthetic models
based on superconducting quantum circuits. In particular, we demonstrate the
unprecedented versatility and control of our method in an engineered three-site
model of a pigment protein complex with realistic parameters scaled down in
energy by a factor of $10^5$. With this system we show that the excitation
transport between quantum coherent sites disordered in energy can be enabled
through the interaction with environmental noise. We also show that the
efficiency of the process is maximized for structured noise resembling
intramolecular phononic environments found in photosynthetic complexes.
