Scientists typically prefer to work with ordered
systems. However, a diverse team of physicists and biophysicists
from the University of Groningen found that individual
light-harvesting nanotubes with disordered molecular structures
still transport light energy in the same way. By combining
spectroscopy, molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical
physics, they discovered how disorder at the molecular level is
effectively averaged out at the microscopic scale. The results were
published on 28 September in the Journal of the American Chemical
Society.
