Energy transfer in light-harvesting complexes

Abstract

Energy migration within the photosynthetic machineries of algae, bacteria and plants has long been considered as a hopping process, which can be described via rate equations. Further, it was assumed that the structure of the photosynthetic units is optimized to maximize the quantum yield of the overall process. However, this simplified approach was questioned after the observation of long lasting coherent oscillations in the 2D-spectra of the FMO complex by Engel and co-workers in 2007 [16]. Since then the effect of coherence on the energy transport properties and its origin has been one of the major lines of investigation in the context of photosynthesis [18, 20, 21, 26– 28, 72, 73].