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The Solar Factory in Your Garden
These days the efficiency of solar technology is improving at a dizzying rate; newspapers and websites are filled with daily reports about novel approaches and applications that are helping to make solar power a practical large-scale energy source. One new approach gets its inspiration from the plant kingdom.
The majority of plants utilize photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy, and do so at nearly 100% efficiency. New research sheds a fascinating light on the process by which this is accomplished.
Conventional wisdom has long held that light-collecting chromophores absorb and then transfer energy in a linear manner, passing energy from molecule to molecule, sort of like a biochemical assembly line. New studies, however, reveal a radically different process, with potentially seismic implications for solar technology. Instead, energy flow appears to adopt a wave-like motion along all paths at once, arriving at its destination almost instantaneously and ensuring that this energy takes the most efficient route. Researchers are not yet sure how plants accomplish this, but greater understanding of this quantum-like effect could be applied to improvements in the process by which photovoltaics gather and distribute energy, especially regarding issues about the feasibility of solar over a large-scale network.
Scientists at the University of California-Berkeley are investigating this process by zapping green sulfur bacteria with ultrashort laser pulses to track the energy flow through the plant’s internal system. I anticipate that future steps of this investigation will look at the same process in more complex plants.
Sources: “Photosynthesis takes a leaf out of the quantum book”, physicsworld.com; “Lusting after 100% energy efficiency? Photosynthesis’ quantum secret may hold key”; www.edn.com; “New Quantum Secrets of Photosynthesis”, Science at Berkeley Lab; “Photosynthesis works by quantum computing”, Chemistry World; “Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems”, “Biophysics: Quantum Path to Photosynthesis” (abstract), Nature; “Quantum Secrets of Photosynthesis Revealed”, ScienceDaily; “When It Comes to Photosynthesis, Plants Perform Quantum Computation”, Scientific American.
