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Tuesday, 13th March 2007 (9133 views)

Photosynthetic systems can be made more energy efficient through the inclusion of gold nanoparticles, according to a new research project.

Scientists working together at Ohio University in the US and Tel Aviv University in Israel have made the discovery that a photosynthetic reaction centre containing chlorophyll bound to gold or silver produces ten times more excited electrons.

This is due to plasmon resonance and faster electron-hole separation which may one day be used to produce artificial light-harvesting systems, according to the scientists.

Alexander Govorov, from Ohio University, told nanotechweb.org: "The exciting result is that by attaching metal nanoparticles to a photosynthetic molecular complex, we can achieve a tenfold increase in the production of excited electrons inside the molecular complex."

He added that he hopes that this principle as well as the proposed hybrid system, made up of nanoparticles plus reaction centre, will be used in experiments to design artificial light-harvesting systems.

The work will be published in Nano Lett with the next step being a modelling exercise where the plasmon enhancement effect is made stronger.

 

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