Photochemistry: Quantum tricks in photosynthesis
The weird world of quantum physics meets biology with the discovery that quantum mechanical effects appear to play a role in photosynthesis.
Graham R. Fleming and colleagues used spectroscopy to study what happens inside a bacteriochlorophyll complex, and detected a ‘quantum beating’. The effect occurs when light-induced excitations in the complex meet and interfere constructively — much like the interactions that occur between the ripples formed by throwing stones into a pond.
Photosynthesis is the all-important process that transforms light, carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy in plants and some bacteria. This wavelike characteristic of this energy transfer process can explain its extreme efficiency, in that vast areas of phase space can be sampled effectively to find the most efficient path for energy transfer.
CONTACT
Graham R. Fleming (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 510 643 2735; E-mail: fleming@cchem.berkeley.edu or grfleming@lbl.gov
Roseanne J. Sension (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 734 763 6074; E-mail: rsension@umich.edu

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