SEMICONDUCTOR QUANTUM DOTS AS LIGHT-HARVESTING ANTENNAE FOR ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS APPLICATIONS

摘要

Artificial photosynthesis, being a green energy, presents many advantages over other types of production of fuel for transportation, including a net reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere (1). However, development of artificial photosynthetic systems has proven to be one of the most challenging tasks of materials science. It has been proposed that the most efficient systems would mimic the natural photosynthetic machinery (2), which includes efficient antennae for collecting solar energy – the light-harvesting (LH) complexes. These complexes initially collect the available photons and then efficiently transfer these to the key element of the photosynthetic system – the reaction center (RC).