Architecture and Function of Biohybrid Solar Cell and Solar-to-Fuel Nanodevices

2020 
In recent years, an immense research effort has been devoted to the generation of hybrid materials which change the electronic properties of one constituent by changing the optoelectronic properties of the other one. The most appealing and commonly used approach to design such materials relies on combining organic materials or metals with biological systems like redox-active proteins. Such hybrid systems can be used e.g. as bio-sensors, bio-fuel cells, biohybrid photoelectrochemical cells and nanosctuctured photoelectronic devices. Although experimental efforts have already resulted in the generation of a number of biohybrid materials, the main bottleneck of this technology is the formation of a stable and efficient (in terms of electronic communication) interface between the biological and the organic/metal counterparts. In particular, the efficiency of the final devices is usually very low due to two main problems related with the interfacing of such different materials: charge recombination at the interface and the high possibility of losing the function of the biological component, which leads to the inactivation of the entire device. In this chapter, we explore the power of computation to answer pressing questions for a rational design of the different components of the biohybrid interface.
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