Living plants can become the solar batteries prototype of the future

Studying the light-harvesting complexes of the living plants, Krasnoyarsk physicists explained how plants "collect" light. According to the scientists, this is the most effective system to absorb and transfer the light energy for today.

If it is possible to understand how the molecular structures work in such systems, it will be possible to design artificial analogues with upgraded natural characteristics. In the future, this will create a new super-fast processors, solar batteries and an artificial system of photosynthesis.

Now the research team with the help of the computer modeling calculates the behavior of molecules when the light passes through a molecular aggregate.

According to Sergey Polyutov, the scientist of Siberian Federal University, the leading researcher of the Laboratory of Nonlinear Optics and Spectroscopy, the study is the development of the ideas of the scientific work published in 2012:

"For several decades the so-called vibrational coupling has been ignored in the studies of the energy transfer in the molecular aggregates and photosynthetic complexes of the leaves of living plants. This is the case when the idea was lying on the surface but no one has picked it up as it seemed unimportant. It turned out to be important. As a result the whole new small scientific field appeared and was able to explain a number of discrepancies between theory and experiment, to progress in understanding the way the nature is, and to move to a more considerate design of the analogues of the natural photosynthesis on that basis".

Sergey Polyutov’s study was carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the universities of Germany, Sweden and China, and its results have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Physics Reports. In the paper “Exciton-Vibrational Coupling in the Dynamics and Spectroscopy of Frenkel Excitons in Molecular Aggregates” the authors also describe all the currently existing basic and advanced methods to consider the effects in question. In the near future, the scientists hope to move from theory and modeling to experiments

The paper was published in the special issue of the journal and entered the 1 % of the most cited papers in this field of science. At the time of its release, the impact factor of the journal was about 23, in a year the paper received 18 citations in the Web of Science database and 21 links in Google scholar. In the ranking of highly cited papers published in 2015 in our country this paper has been placed from 60 to 120 out of 50 thousand Russian papers.

Press Office of SibFU, 13 july 2016