Blog Archives
Gustavo “Gus” Mondragón M.Sc. – Thesis Defense
We celebrate the successful thesis defense of Gustavo “Gus” Mondragón who has now completed his Masters degree and is now on to getting a PhD in our group. Gustavo has worked on the search for multiexcitonic states and their involvement in the excitonic transference between photosynthetic pigments, specifically between bacteriochlorophyll-d molecules (BChl-d) from the bchQRU chlorosome whose whole structure is shown in the gallery below. To this end, Gustavo has studied and implemented the Restricted Active Space method with double spin flip (RAS-2SF) with the use of QChem5.0, a method that has required the use and understanding of states with high multiplicities. Additionally, Gustavo has investigated the influence of the environment within the chlorosome by performing ONIOM calculations for the spectroscopic properties of a BChl-d dimer, finding albeit qualitatively a batochromic effect, probably an expected result but nonetheless an impressive feat for the level of theory selected.
BChQRU chlorosome. 600 Bchl-d molecules 
There’s still a lot of work to do in this line of research and although we’re eager to publish our results in this excitonic transference mechanism we want to be completely sure that we’re taking every possibility into consideration so we don’t incur into any inconsistencies.
Gustavo cultivates many research interests from excited states of these pigments to biochemical processes that require the use of various tools; I’m sure his permanence in our lab will bring lots of interesting results. Congratulations, Gus! Thank you for your hard work.
Photosynthesis and Singlet Fission – #WATOC2017 PO1-296
If you work in the field of photovoltaics or polyacene photochemistry, then you are probably aware of the Singlet Fission (SF) phenomenon. SF can be broadly described as the process where an excited singlet state decays to a couple of degenerate coupled triplet states (via a multiexcitonic state) with roughly half the energy of the original singlet state, which in principle could be centered in two neighboring molecules; this generates two holes with a single photon, i.e. twice the current albeit at half the voltage (Fig 1).
Jablonski’s Diagram for SF
It could also be viewed as the inverse process to triplet-triplet annihilation. An important requirement for SF is that the two triplets to which the singlet decays must be coupled in a 1(TT) state, otherwise the process is spin-forbidden. Unfortunately (from a computational perspective) this also means that the 3(TT) and 5(TT) states are present and should be taken into account, and when it comes to chlorophyll derivatives the task quickly scales.
SF has been observed in polyacenes but so far the only photosynthetic pigments that have proven to exhibit SF are some carotene derivatives; so what about chlorophyll derivatives? For a -very- long time now, we have explored the possibility of finding a naturally-occurring, chlorophyll-based, photosynthetic system in which SF could be possible.
But first things first; The methodology: It was soon enough clear, from María Eugenia Sandoval’s MSc thesis, that TD-DFT wasn’t going to be enough to capture the whole description of the coupled states which give rise to SF. It was then that we started our collaboration with SF expert, Prof. David Casanova from the Basque Country University at Donostia, who suggested the use of Restricted Active Space – Spin Flip in order to account properly for the spin change during decay of the singlet excited state. A set of optimized bacteriochlorophyll-a molecules (BChl-a) were oriented ad-hoc so their Qy transition dipole moments were either parallel or perpendicular; the rate to which SF could be in principle present yielded that both molecules should be in a parallel Qy dipole moments configuration. When translated to a naturally-occurring system we sought in two systems: The Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex (FMO) containing 7 BChl-a molecules and a chlorosome from a mutant photosynthetic bacteria made up of 600 Bchl-d molecules (Fig 2). The FMO complex is a trimeric pigment-protein complex which lies between the antennae complex and the reaction center in green sulfur dependent photosynthetic bacteria such as P. aestuarii or C. tepidium, serving thus as a molecular wire in which is known that the excitonic transfer occurs with quantum coherence, i.e. virtually no energy loss which led us to believe SF could be an operating mechanism. So far it seems it is not present. However, for a crystallographic BChl-d dimer present in the chlorosome it could actually occur even when in competition with fluorescence.
FMO Complex. Trimer (left), monomer (center), pigments (right)
BChQRU chlorosome. 600 Bchl-d molecules
I will keep on blogging more -numerical and computational- details about these results and hopefully about its publication but for now I will wrap this post by giving credit where credit is due: This whole project has been tackled by our former lab member María Eugenia “Maru” Sandoval and Gustavo Mondragón. Finally, after much struggle, we are presenting our results at WATOC 2017 next week on Monday 28th at poster session 01 (PO1-296), so please stop by to say hi and comment on our work so we can improve it and bring it home!
