From Photosynthesis to Photovoltaics: Learning about Solar Energy Conversion from Photosynthesis

May 15, 2017
Stoney’s British Pub

3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE

7:30pm

Jessica M. Anna
University of Pennsylvania
“From Photosynthesis to Photovoltaics: Learning about Solar Energy Conversion from Photosynthesis”
 

Photosynthetic organisms have developed the molecular level machinery to convert solar energy into chemical bonds. The first step in this process is light harvesting, where pigment-protein complexes absorb sunlight and convert this energy into a charge separated state. Understanding the process by which these natural photosynthetic complexes create the charge separated state may lead to insight into the design of artificial photosynthetic systems and development of new technologies for solar energy conversion. In this talk I will discuss some of our recent studies in this area, where we use ultrafast multidimensional spectroscopy to gain insight into the very first steps of light harvesting in photosystem I – one of nature’s most efficient energy converters.