Coherent oscillations in chlorosome elucidated by two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy

초록

Excitation energy transfer in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes (LHCs) has attracted much interest due to their potential applications in solar cells. In particular, from recent spectroscopic studies on natural light harvesting complexes, it was proposed that long-lived electronic coherence generated among electronic excited states may play a crucial role in achieving high efficiency of excitation energy transfer in natural photosynthetic LHCs, thus negating the traditional mechanism of incoherent hopping (called Förster energy transfer). Although the identity (electronic vs. vibrational) and the exact role of the quantum coherence in photosynthetic energy transfer are still in dispute, the mechanism of energy transfer among the exciton states in LHCs has become a hot topic of investigation in association with an emerging field of quantum biology.