Photosynthetic antennae systems: energy transport and optical absorption

Abstract

The energy transport and the optical line shape of molecular aggregates, modeling bacteria photosynthetic light-harvesting systems (chlorosomes in the case of Chlorobium tepidum or Chloroflexus aurantiacus and LH2 in the case of Rhodopseudomonas acidophila) is investigated theoretically. The molecular units are described by two-level systems with an average excitation energy ε and interacting with each other through nearest-neighbor interactions. For LH2 an elliptical deformation of the ring is also allowed. Furthermore, dynamic and in the case of LH2 also quasi-static fluctuations of the local excitation energies are taken into account, simulating fast molecular vibrations and slow motions of the protein backbone, respectively. The fluctuations are described by Gaussian Markov processes in the case of the chlorosomes and by colored dichotomic Markov processes, with exponentially decaying correlation functions, with small ( λ s) and large ( λ) decay constants, in the case of LH2.