Two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy and photosynthesis: Fundamentals and applications to photosynthetic light-harvesting

In natural light harvesting systems, pigment-protein complexes are able to harvest sunlight with near unity quantum efficiency. These complexes exhibit emergent properties that cannot be simply extrapolated from knowledge of their component parts. In this perspective, we focus on how two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) can provide an incisive tool to probe the electronic, energetic, and spatial landscapes that must be understood to describe photosynthetic light-harvesting. We review the theoretical and experimental principles of 2DES, and demonstrate its application to the study of the Photosystem II supercomplex of green plants. We illustrate several capabilities of 2DES, including monitoring energy transfer pathways, observing excitonic coherence, determining excitonic geometry, and informing on the atomic structure. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.