Natural Photosynthesis and Nano-Technology: Bridging the Gap

In this lecture we will review basic principles of primary events in natural photosynthesis occurring in plants and bacteria. We will put the claims about remarkable efficiency of photosynthetic light-harvesting in the context of efficiencies of man (and woman) made photovoltaic materials, and in the context of organism’s struggle for survival. This will reveal as naïve the assumption that three billion years of evolutionary optimization delivered a perfect natural photosynthetic machinery to be just copied by modern nanotechnology. We will suggest which principles and components of natural light-harvesting machinery are worth attention from technological point of view. We will discuss how these principles and components are reflected in their current quantum mechanical description, from Hamiltonians to energy transfer rates. We will propose one possible implementation of these principles in a new artificial material and discuss experiments on its naturally occurring version.