Pathways of excitation energy flow in light-harvesting systems uncovered with ultrabroadband 2D electronic spectroscopy

In light harvesting, sunlight is captured by arrays of coupled chromophores and then funneled towards the site of energy conversion. A major roadblock in mapping the pathways of energy transfer had been that most previous experiments measured only a narrow portion of the broad solar spectrum captured by light-harvesting systems. I will present the development of ultrabroadband 2D electronic spectroscopy, an ultrafast spectroscopic tool that enables mapping of energy flow across the visible and the near-infrared range, and how this technique enabled the discovery of previously inaccessible photophysics in natural and artificial light-harvesting systems.