There are following categories (projects and possibly other research subjects) related to Photosynthesis:
Photosynthesis is a process where living organisms convert light energy into chemical energy of organic compounds. See for example Wikipedia
In our department we study the initial ultrafast stages of photosynthesis. The process starts by light absorption in a so called antenna system. Antenna is a network of pigments (chlorophylls, e.g.) arranged in a way which warrants efficient light absorption and fast directed excitation transfer towards a so called reaction center (RC). In the later, excitation energy drives an electron via a chain of donor-acceptor molecules through a membrane and the generated electrostatic potential is used in later biochemical reactions. These primary photosynthetic reactions are very efficient having nearly 100% quantum efficiency. Our research is related to the excitation transfer in the antenna systems. In the past the process was usually described via hopping-like Förster transfer. Studies by us and by other groups have given strong evidence that in many antennas the excitation energy is coherently delocalized over a number of pigment molecules. In order to describe transfer of such partially delocalized excitations, Redfield relaxation theory is used. In our studies we have also found evidence for polaron formation in some antenna systems. Polarons appear because of strong coupling between electronic excitation and nuclear motions which leads to selftrapping of the excitons. Recently a novel technique, coherent multidimensional spectroscopy [T. Brixner; J. Stenger, H. M. Vaswani, M. Cho, R. E. Blankenship, G. R. Fleming, Nature, 2005, 434, 625-628; G. S. Engel, T. R. Calhoun, E. L. Read, T.-K. Ahn, T. Mancal, Y.-C. Cheng, R. E. Blankenship, G. R. Fleming, Nature, 2007, 446, 782-786.], has provided unprecedentedly reach information content enabling to disentangle very fine details of the excitation dynamics. It was concluded that the electronic coherence may have substantially large role in making the primary photosynthesis as efficient as possible. Such studies are on the way also in our department.