Month: September 2022

MECHANISTIC BLACK BOX. "Highly efficient solar energy harvesting and trapping in photosynthesis relies on sophisticated molecular machinery built from pigment-protein complexes. Although the pathways and time scales of excitation energy transfers within and among these photosynthetic complexes are well studied, less is known about the precise mechanism responsible for the energy transfer." https://lnkd.in/ednXgcJ View in LinkedIn

PHOTOSYNTHESIS. "Photons hitting an antenna molecule will kick up ripples of energized electrons — excitons — like a rock splashing water from a puddle. These excitons then pass from one molecule to the next until they reach the reaction centre. But is their path made up of random, undirected hops, as researchers initially assumed? Or could their motion be more organized?" https://lnkd.in/eDJed9B View in LinkedIn

QUANTUM PATHWAYS. "Recent work has documented that light-absorbing molecules in some photosynthetic proteins capture and transfer energy according to quantum-mechanical probability laws instead of classical laws at temperatures up to 180 K. This contrasts with the long-held view that long-range quantum coherence between molecules cannot be sustained in complex biological systems, even at low temperatures." https://lnkd.in/edvYfjM View in LinkedIn

EXCITON'S ORGANIZED MOTION. "Engel et al., have demonstrated... that surprisingly long-lived (>660 fs) quantum coherences between excitonic states play an important role in the dynamics of energy transfer in photosynthetic complexes—i.e., the energy transfer is described by wavelike coherent motion instead of incoherent hopping." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5830/1462 View in LinkedIn

LONG-LIVED COHERENCE. "Here we extend previous two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy investigations of the FMO bacteriochlorophyll complex, and obtain direct evidence for remarkably long-lived electronic quantum coherence playing an important part in energy transfer processes within this system." https://lnkd.in/eiN8WgU View in LinkedIn

PHOTONS STRIKING PLANTS. "Coherent quantum waves can exist in two or more states at the same time, so coherent excitons would be able to move through the forest of antenna molecules by two or more routes at once. In fact, they could simultaneously explore a multitude of possible options, and automatically select the most efficient path to the reaction centre." https://lnkd.in/eDJed9B View in LinkedIn

"THE QUANTUM COHERENCE manifests itself in characteristic, directly observable quantum beating signals among the excitons within the Chlorobium tepidum FMO complex at 77 K. This wavelike characteristic of the energy transfer within the photosynthetic complex can explain its extreme efficiency, in that it allows the complexes to sample vast areas of phase space to find the most efficient path." https://lnkd.in/e7zeiN5 View in LinkedIn

QUANTUM COHERENCE. "Direct evidence for the presence of quantum coherence over appreciable length scales and timescales in the FMO complex was observed by Engel et al. Since that time a huge body of literature has arisen, and further experiments suggest that the coherence is non-negligible even at room temperature, for up to 300 fs." https://lnkd.in/eRUdQZj View in LinkedIn

ANTENNA PROTEINS. "Photosynthesis makes use of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into useful biomass and is vital for life on Earth. Crucial components for the photosynthetic process are antenna proteins, which absorb light and transmit the resultant excitation energy between molecules to a reaction centre." https://lnkd.in/edvYfjM View in LinkedIn

"PHOTOSYNTHETIC ANTENNA complexes capture and concentrate solar radiation by transferring the excitation to the reaction center that stores energy from the photon in chemical bonds. This process occurs with near-perfect quantum efficiency." https://lnkd.in/eytWxV5 View in LinkedIn