About
Jesus Valdiviezo, Duke Chemistry PhD candidate, discusses the collaborative effort of the Center for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence (PI: David Beratan).
Contact August Burns (august.burns@duke.edu) for a link.
Abstract: The wave-like properties of matter at the nanoscale allows electronic and vibrational states to remain quantum coherent when a fixed phase and amplitude is present between different states. However, random fluctuation of the environment causes coherence to be short-lived. Sustaining coherence could enhance function in chemical systems, allowing them to harvest and transmit energy and information. I will discuss the collaborative effort of the Center for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence (CSQC) to construct covalently linked, strongly coupled light-harvesting complexes based on porphyrin arrays that exhibit efficient energy transfer assisted by coherent, non-thermal processes. We first studied the photophysical properties of the compounds using time-dependent density functional theory. The computed energy and electron transfer parameters were used to simulate the excited state dynamics employing quantum dynamics tools. Our computational results guided the synthesis and spectroscopic characterization of the multichromophoric systems, which could collect and direct energy via non-thermal quantum mechanisms.