Light-harvesting system 2 (LH2) of purple bacteria is one of the most popular antenna complexes used to study Nature's way of collecting and channeling solar energy. The dynamics of the absorbed energy is probed by ultrafast spectroscopy. Simulation of these experiments relies on fitting a range of parameters to reproduce the spectra. Here, we present a method that can determine key parameters to chemical accuracy. These will eliminate free variables in the modeling, thus reducing the problem. Using MS-RASPT2/RASSCF calculations, we compute excitation energies and transition dipole moments of all bacteriochlorophylls in LH2. We find that the excitation energies vary among the bacteriochlorophyll monomers and that they are regulated by the curvature of the macrocycle ring and the dihedral angle of an acetyl moiety. Increasing the curvature lifts the ground state energy, which causes a red shift of the excitation energy. Increasing the torsion of the acetyl moiety raises the excited state energy, resulting in a blue shift of the excitation energy. The obtained results mark a giant leap for multiconfigurational multireference quantum chemical methods in the photochemistry of biological systems, which can prove instrumental in exposing the underlying physics of photosynthetic light-harvesting.

Natural light-harvesting is performed by pigment-protein complexes, which collect and funnel the solar energy at the start of photosynthesis. The identity and arrangement of pigments largely define the absorption spectrum of the antenna complex, which is further regulated by a palette of structural factors. Small alterations are induced by pigment-protein interactions. In light-harvesting systems 2 and 3 from , the pigments are arranged identically, yet the former has an absorption peak at 850 nm that is blue-shifted to 820 nm in the latter. While the shift has previously been attributed to the removal of hydrogen bonds, which brings changes in the acetyl moiety of the bacteriochlorophyll, recent work has shown that other mechanisms are also present. Using computational and modeling tools on the corresponding crystal structures, we reach a different conclusion: The most critical factor for the shift is the curvature of the macrocycle ring. The bending of the planar part of the pigment is identified as the second-most important design principle for the function of pigment-protein complexes-a finding that can inspire the design of novel artificial systems.

The modeling of vibrations in optical spectra relies heavily on the simplifications brought about by using harmonic oscillators. However, realistic molecular systems can deviate substantially from this description. We develop two methods which show that the extension to arbitrarily shaped potential energy surfaces is not only straightforward, but also efficient. These methods are applied to an electronic two-level system with potential energy surfaces of polynomial form and used to study anharmonic features such as the zero-phonon line shape and mirror-symmetry breaking between absorption and fluorescence spectra. The first method, which constructs vibrational wave functions as linear combinations of the harmonic oscillator wave functions, is shown to be extremely robust and can handle large anharmonicities. The second method uses the cumulant expansion, which is readily solved, even at high orders, thanks to an ideally suited matrix theorem.