Emerging nonlinear optical spectroscopies enable deeper insight into the intricate world of interactions and dynamics of complex molecular systems. 2D electronic spectroscopy appears to be especially well suited for studying multichromophoric complexes such as light-harvesting complexes of photosynthetic organisms as it allows direct observation of couplings between the pigments and charts dyna...

Colloidal Nanocrystals (NCs) with fluorescence originating from surface complexes are successfully prepared. The components of these NCs range from insulator, semiconductor to metal, with either pure phase, doped or core/shell structures. The photoluminescence of these NCs can be reversibly tuned across the visible to infrared spectrum, and even allow multi-color emission. A light emitting devi...

The main objective of this study was to assess Radon concentration in the harvested rainwater (HRW) at the household level in Yatta area, Palestine. HRW is mainly used for drinking as it is the major source of water for domestic uses due to water scarcity. Ninety HRW samples from the household cisterns were collected from six localities (a town and five villages) and Radon concentrations were m...

We present the first implementation of femtosecond soft X-ray spectroscopy as an ultrafast direct probe of the excited-state valence orbitals in solution-phase molecules. This method is applied to photoinduced spin crossover of [Fe(tren(py)3)](2+), where the ultrafast spin-state conversion of the metal ion, initiated by metal-to-ligand charge-transfer excitation, is directly measured using the ...

We have investigated the energy landscape of the bacterial photosynthetic peripheral light-harvesting complex LH2 of purple bacterium Rhodopseudomonas acidophila by monitoring sequences of fluorescence spectra of single LH2 assemblies, at room temperature, with different excitation intensities as well as at elevated temperatures, utilizing a confocal microscope. The fluorescence peak wavelength...

The atomic structure of the bacterial light-harvesting complex helps to explain how the energy of sunlight is efficiently absorbed and transferred between bacteriochlorophyll molecules towards the reaction centre.

Finding representative reaction pathways is important for understanding the mechanism of molecular processes. We propose a new approach for constructing reaction paths based on mean first-passage times. This approach incorporates information about all possible reaction events as well as the effect of temperature. As an application of this method, we study representative pathways of excitation m...

When dealing with system-reservoir interactions in an open quantum system, such as a photosynthetic light-harvesting complex, approximations are usually made to obtain the dynamics of the system. One question immediately arises: how good are these approximations, and in what ways can we evaluate them? Here, we propose to use entanglement and a measure of non-Markovianity as benchmarks for the d...