Artificial photosynthetic systems for solar fuels production must collect light energy, separate charge, and transport charge to catalytic sites where multi-electron redox processes will occur. The goal of our research in this field is to understand the fundamental principles needed to develop integrated artificial photosynthetic systems. These principles include how to promote and control: 1) energy capture, charge separation, and long-range directional energy and charge transport, 2) coupling of separated charges to multi-electron catalysts for fuel formation, and 3) supramolecular self-assembly for scalable, low-cost processing from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The central scientific challenge is to develop small, functional building blocks, having a minimum number of covalent linkages, which also have the appropriate molecular recognition properties to facilitate self-assembly of complete, functional artificial photosynthetic systems. This lecture will describe our use of ultrafast optical spectroscopy and time-resolved EPR spectroscopy to understand charge transport in self-ordering structures for artificial photosynthesis.

Self-ordering organic nanostructures for solar energy conversion

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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