Related papers: Structure and efficiency in bacterial photosynthet…
Photosynthetic microbes have evolved and successfully adapted to the ever-changing environmental conditions in complex microhabitats throughout almost all ecosystems on Earth. In the absence of light, they can sustain their biological…
The rate at which matter emits or absorbs light can be modified by its environment, as dramatically exemplified by the widely-studied phenomenon of superradiance. The reverse process, superabsorption, is harder to demonstrate due to the…
Natural and artificial light harvesting systems often operate in a regime where the flux of photons is relatively low. Besides absorbing as many photons as possible it is therefore paramount to prevent excitons from annihilation via photon…
Photosynthesis relies on a network of chlorophyll-like molecules which together lead to efficient long-range energy funneling. Evidence at cryogenic temperatures suggests that mechanistic details of energy/charge transfer must invoke…
Two distinct approaches, the Frenkel-Dirac time-dependent variation and the Haken-Strobl model, are adopted to study energy transfer dynamics in single-ring and double-ring light-harvesting systems in purple bacteria. It is found that…
We use moving light patterns to control the motion of {\it Escherichia coli} bacteria whose motility is photo-activated. Varying the pattern speed controls the magnitude and direction of the bacterial flux, and therefore the accumulation of…
Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…
Light-harvesting via the transport and trapping of optically-induced electronic excitations is of fundamental interest to the design of new energy efficient quantum technologies. Using a paradigmatic quantum optical model, we study the…
Despite several different measures of efficiency that are applicable to the photosynthetic systems, a precise degree of efficiency of these systems is not completely determined. Introducing an efficient model for the dynamics of…
The incoherence of sunlight has long been suspected to have an impact on solar cell energy conversion efficiency, although the extent of this is unclear. Existing computational methods used to optimize solar cell efficiency under incoherent…
Unravelling the nature of energy transport in multi-chromophoric photosynthetic complexes is essential to extract valuable design blueprints for light-harvesting applications. Long-range exciton transport in such systems is facilitated by a…
How molecules convert light energy to perform a specific transformation is a fundamental question in photophysics. Ultrafast spectroscopy reveals the kinetics associated with electronic energy flow, but little is known about how absorbed…
Biomolecular light-harvesting antennas operate as nanoscale devices in a regime where the coherent interactions of individual light, matter and vibrational quanta are non-perturbatively strong. The complex behaviour arising from this could,…
The repeating arrangement of tubulin dimers confers great mechanical strength to microtubules, which are used as scaffolds for intracellular macromolecular transport in cells and exploited in biohybrid devices. The crystalline order in a…
We explore energy transfer in a generic three-level system, which is coupled to three non-equilibrium baths. Built on the concept of quantum heat engine, our three-level model describes non-equilibrium quantum processes including…
Identifying signatures of quantum coherent behaviour in photoactive systems that are maintained in stationary states away from thermal equilibrium is an open problem of wide interest in a variety of physical scenarios, including single…
It is thought that nature already exploits quantum mechanical properties to increase the efficiency of solar energy harvesting devices. So, the operation of these devices can be enhanced by clever design of a nanoscopic, quantum mechanical…
The interaction of light with photosynthetic proteins is an extremely efficient process and has been thoroughly investigated. However, exploring light-matter interactions in hybrid nano-solid-photosynthetic proteins is a relatively new and…
Charge separation in light-harvesting complexes occurs in a pair of tightly coupled chlorophylls at the heart of photosynthetic reaction centers of both plants and bacteria. Recently it has been shown that quantum coherence can, in…
Photoinduced charge-transfer excitations are key to understand the primary processes of natural photosynthesis and for designing photovoltaic and photocatalytic devices. In this paper, we use Bacteriochlorophyll dimers extracted from the…