Abstract
The effects of combining naturally evolved photosynthetic pigment–protein complexes with inorganic functional materials, especially plasmonically active metallic nanostructures, have been a widely studied topic in the last few decades. Besides other applications, it seems to be reasonable using such hybrid systems for designing future biomimetic solar cells. In this paper, we describe selected results that point out to various aspects of the interactions between photosynthetic complexes and plasmonic excitations in Silver Island Films (SIFs). In addition to simple light-harvesting complexes, like peridinin-chlorophyll-protein (PCP) or the Fenna–Matthews–Olson (FMO) complex, we also discuss the properties of large, photosynthetic reaction centers (RCs) and Photosystem I (PSI)—both prokaryotic PSI core complexes and eukaryotic PSI supercomplexes with attached antenna clusters (PSI-LHCI)—deposited on SIF substrates.
Highlights
Among the grand challenges for science in the 21st century, environmental pollution together with a possible energy crisis and the necessity for developing new renewable energy sources stand out as the most critical [1,2]
We present the results of comprehensive studies carried out for a variety of photosynthetic complexes either solely responsible for the absorption of the solar energy, or those which participate in photochemistry upon coupling to Silver Island Films (SIFs) structures
For most of the results presented in this survey, a wet-chemistry SIF preparation was used, in which glucose was added at the last stage [25]
Summary
Among the grand challenges for science in the 21st century, environmental pollution together with a possible energy crisis and the necessity for developing new renewable energy sources stand out as the most critical [1,2]. With respect to increasing and/or tuning the absorption of natural and artificial photosynthetic molecular systems, encouraging results have been achieved using metallic nanostructures [9,20–23] These nanostructures exhibit a unique property associated with collective oscillations of electrons induced by electromagnetic waves: so-called plasmons [9,17]. It has been shown in numerous reports that plasmons excited in metallic nanostructures can affect the optical properties of emitters placed in their vicinity (at distances of up to tens of nm) This interaction, is generally rather complex, with the net result ranging from strongly enhanced fluorescence (due to increase of local electric field intensity or the Purcell effect) to fluorescence quenching and energy dissipation [9,17,24]. SIF structures feature very broad absorption spectra associated with the plasmon resonance in islands of varied size In this way, plasmon resonances can affect the optical properties of natural and artificial photosynthetic complexes within an exceptionally broad spectral range. To show the influence of SIF chemistry and morphology, hybrid structures containing Photosystem I (PSI)—the photosynthetic supercomplex with the largest number of Chl a molecules—and SIF substrates fabricated with different approaches are presented
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