Photoactive Electrodes Incorporating Electrosprayed Bacterial Reaction Centers |
| |
| Authors: | Seyed M Mirvakili Joanna E Slota Ashwin R Usgaocar Ali Mahmoudzadeh Daniel Jun Mehr Negar Mirvakili J Thomas Beatty John D W Madden |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, BioInstrumentation Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;3. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;4. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| |
| Abstract: | Highly efficient light absorption and charge separation within the photosystem and reaction center (RC) complexes of photosynthetic plants and bacteria are of great interest for solar cell and photo detector applications, since they offer almost unity quantum yield and expected ultimate power conversion efficiencies of more than 18% and 12%, respectively. In addition, the charge separated states created by these protein complexes are very long lived compared to conventional semiconductor solar cells. In this work, a novel technique is presented for the deposition of photosynthetic protein complexes, by electrospraying RCs of Rhodobacter sphaeroides onto highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) electrodes. Remarkably, it is shown that the RCs not only survive exposure to the high electric fields but also yield peak photocurrent densities of up to 7 μA cm?2, which is equal to the highest value reported to date. |
| |
| Keywords: | photosynthetic reaction centers solar cells electrospray rhodobacter sphaeroides HOPG |
|
|
