Dynamic localization of electronic excitation in photosynthetic complexes revealed with chiral two-dimensional spectroscopy

Time-resolved ultrafast optical probes of chiral dynamics provide a new window allowing us to explore how interactions with such structured environments drive electronic dynamics. Incorporating optical activity into time-resolved spectroscopies has proven challenging because of the small signal and large achiral background. Here we demonstrate that two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy can be adapted to detect chiral signals and that these signals reveal how excitations delocalize and contract following excitation. We dynamically probe the evolution of chiral electronic structure in the light-harvesting complex 2 of purple bacteria following photoexcitation by creating a chiral two-dimensional mapping. The dynamics of the chiral two-dimensional signal directly reports on changes in the degree of delocalization of the excitonic states following photoexcitation. The mechanism of energy transfer in this system may enhance transfer probability because of the coherent coupling among chromophores while suppressing fluorescence that arises from populating delocalized states. This generally applicable spectroscopy will provide an incisive tool to probe ultrafast transient molecular fluctuations that are obscured in non-chiral experiments. Nonlinear chiral optical activity is difficult to measure because of weak signal amidst strong achiral background. Here, the authors perform a nonlinear chiral two-dimensional spectroscopic mapping of light-harvesting complex 2 during photoexcitation and observe exciton delocalization.