On the biphoton excitation of the fluorescence of the bacteriochlorophyll molecules of purple photosynthetic bacteria by powerful near IR femto-picosecond pulses

Abstract

The authors of a number of experimental works detected nonresonance biphoton excitation of bacteriochlorophyll molecules, which represent the main pigment in the light-absorbing natural “antenna” complexes of photosynthesizing purple bacteria, by femtosecond IR pulses (1250–1500 nm). They believe that IR quanta excite hypothetic forbidden levels of the pigments of these bacteria in the double frequency range 625–750 nm. We propose and ground an alternative triplet mechanism to describe this phenomenon. According to our hypothesis, the mechanism of biphoton excitation of molecules by IR quanta can manifest itself specifically, through high triplet levels of molecules in the high fields induced by femtosecond-picosecond laser pulses.