Coherence in the Bacterial Reaction Center

Photosynthetic Reaction Center (RC) protein complexes rapidly trap absorbed sunlight and convert the excitation energy into a stable charge separation with near unity quantum efficiency in wild type proteins. In the past decade a large amount of research has been devoted to understanding the phenomenon of long-lived coherent oscillatory states in RCs, as well as other photosynthetic and molecular systems. Here we present ultrafast multidimensional spectra of the W(M250)V bacterial RC, which undergoes charge separation, and discuss our recent work to understand the physical origin of the observed coherent signals and what they reveal about the electronic structure of the bacterial RC.