ERC-2011 Ideas Starting Grant 277755
The interplay between quantum coherence and environment in the photosynthetic electronic energy transfer and light-harvesting: a quantum chemical picture
Photon energy absorption and electronic energy transfer (EET) represents the first fundamental step in both natural and artificial light-harvesting systems. The most striking example is photosynthesis, in which plants, algae and bacteria are able to transfer the absorbed light to the reaction centers in proteins with almost perfect quantum efficiency. Two-dimensional spectroscopic measurements suggest that the role of the environment (a protein or a given embedding supramolecular architecture) is fundamental in determining both the dynamics and the efficiency of the process. What is still missing in order to fully understand and characterize EET is a new theoretical and computational approach which can reproduce the microscopic dynamics of the process based on an accurate description of the playing actors, i.e. the transferring pigments and the environment. This project aims at developing such an approach integrating completely new theoretical and computational tools with different length and time scales.