Related papers: Structure and efficiency in bacterial photosynthet…
Photosynthetic organisms rely on a network of light-harvesting protein-pigment complexes to efficiently absorb sunlight and transfer excitation energy to reaction center proteins for charge separation. In photosynthetic purple bacteria,…
Light harvesting 2 (LH2) complex is a primary component of the photosynthetic unit of purple bacteria that is responsible for harvesting and relaying excitons. The electronic absorption line shape of LH2 contains two major bands at 800 nm…
Some species of purple bacteria as, e.g., Rhodobacter sphaeroides contain the protein PufX. Concurrently, the light harvesting complexes 1 (LH1) form dimers of open rings. In mutants without PufX, the LH1s are closed rings and…
Electronic 2D spectroscopy allows nontrivial quantum effects in chemistry and biology to be explored in unprecedented detail. Here, we apply recently developed fluorescence detected coherent 2D spectroscopy to study the light harvesting…
Mechanisms to use nanoparticles to separate sunlight into photovoltaic useful range and thermally useful range to increase the efficiency of solar cells and to dissipate heat radiatively are discussed based upon lessons we learnt from…
Determining how energy flows within and between molecules is crucial for understanding chemical reactions, material properties, and even vital processes such as photosynthesis. While the general principles of energy transfer are well…
Many motile microorganisms react to environmental light cues with a variety of motility responses guiding cells towards better conditions for survival and growth. The use of spatial light modulators could help to elucidate the mechanisms of…
Large-scale simulations of light-matter interaction in natural photosynthetic antenna complexes of the Chlorobium Tepidum green sulfur bacteria (GSB) containing more than one hundred thousand chlorophyll molecules, comparable with natural…
A fundamental issue that limits the efficiency of many photoelectrochemical systems is that the photon absorption length is typically much longer than the electron diffusion length. Various photon management schemes have been developed to…
Near-unity energy transfer efficiency has been widely observed in natural photosynthetic complexes. This phenomenon has attracted broad interest from different fields, such as physics, biology, chemistry and material science, as it may…
The light-harvesting efficiency of a photoactive molecular complex is largely determined by the properties of its electronic quantum states. Those, in turn, are influenced by molecular vibrational states of the nuclear degrees of freedom.…
Understanding how the effectiveness of natural photosynthetic energy harvesting systems arises from the interplay between quantum coherence and environmental noise represents a significant challenge for quantum theory. Recently it has begun…
Photosynthesis relies on efficient energy relaxation within the excited-state manifold of pigment-protein complexes. Since the protein scaffold is rather flexible, the resulting energetic and structural disorder gives rise to a complex…
The theoretical and experimental study of energy transfer in photosynthesis has revealed an interesting transport regime, which lies at the borderline between classical transport dynamics and quantum-mechanical interference effects.…
The fundamental physical mechanisms of energy transfer in photosynthetic complexes is not yet fully understood. In particular, the degree of efficiency or sensitivity of these systems for energy transfer is not known given their…
We've studied the B800 part of Rhodoblastus acidophilus light-harvesting complex (LH2) by several quantum chemical techniques based on the density functional theory (DFT) and determined the specific method and a minimal reliable model…
We consider bio-inspired ring systems as photovoltaic circuits to explore the advantage of `optical ratcheting', a process whereby the arrangement of coupled optical dipoles enables delocalised excitonic states that are protected against…
Fast and efficient calculations of optical responses using electromagnetic models require computational acceleration and compression techniques. A hierarchical matrix approach is adopted for this purpose. In order to model large-scale…
We study the light absorption and energy transferring in a donor-acceptor system with a bionic structure. In the optimal case with uniform couplings, it is found that the quantum dynamics of this seemingly complicated system is reduced as a…
A generic and intuitive model for coherent energy transport in multiple minima systems coupled to a quantum mechanical bath is shown. Using a simple spin-boson system, we illustrate how a generic donor-acceptor system can be brought into…