Learning from plants: visible light energy harvesting
Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 06:00
in Physics & Chemistry
How do they do it? Plants make use of only the energy of sunlight for their requirements. Many researchers are trying to mimic the process to harness the vast energy of the sun. In the article published recently in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.,[1] Jianzhang Zhao et al. of the Dalian University of Technology (China) showed that long-lived triplet excited states are tremendously important for applications in light harvesting. Now they report in the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry significantly long room-temperature triplet excited state lifetimes for cyclometallated, coumarin-containing IrIII complexes with strong absorption in the visible range.