Abstract

Light-induced processes processes are ubiquitous in nature, for example in the harvesting of solar energy. Isolated biological chromophores provide ideal laboratories for studying the key elementary processes following light-absorption, free from the complications of interactions with aqueous or protein environments. In this seminar, I will discuss how femtosecond time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy is a valuable tool for probing the electronic structure and electronic and molecular dynamics of biological motifs and chromophores in the gas-phase. This will be followed by a discussion of our recent work investigating the remarkable photostability of some of nature’s key molecular motifs (aniline and pyrrole) and the competition between ultrafast non-radiative decay and fluorescence in the chromophore of the green fluorescent protein, one of the most widely used fluorescent proteins in biological imaging.