Long-range exciton transport is a key challenge in achieving efficient solar energy harvesting in both organic solar cells and photosynthetic systems. Self-assembled molecular aggregates provide the potential for attaining long-range exciton transport through strong intermolecular coupling. However, there currently lacks an experimental tool to directly characterize exciton transport in space and in time to elucidate mechanisms. Here we report a direct visualization of exciton diffusion in tubular molecular aggregates by transient absorption microscopy with ∼200 fs time resolution and ∼50 nm spatial precision. These direct measurements provide exciton diffusion constants of 3-6 cm s for the tubular molecular aggregates, which are 3-5 times higher than a theoretical lower bound obtained by assuming incoherent hopping. These results suggest that coherent effects play a role, despite the fact that exciton states near the band bottom crucial for transport are only weakly delocalized (over <10 molecules). The methods presented here establish a direct approach for unraveling the mechanisms and main parameters underlying exciton transport in large molecular assemblies.

Absorption and linear dichroism spectra of self-assembled tubular aggregates of TPPS(4) porphyrin are studied theoretically with special emphasis on the low energy part of the spectra (the Q band region) where the coupling with intramolecular vibrations is pronounced. The model Hamiltonian includes both the excitonic coupling between four molecular electronic excited states contributing to the porphyrin Q and B bands as well as the intermediate-strength linear exciton-phonon coupling to one effective high-frequency molecular vibrational mode. Good agreement between the calculated and experimental spectra is obtained. The results allow us to identify the nature of the peaks observed in the Q band region of the aggregate's absorption spectrum; we show that the two most prominent peaks within the Q band originate from two different excitonic subbands. It is shown that the coupling between the Q and B bands plays an important role and the vibronic coupling affects the details of the absorption lineshape.

The extreme sensitivity of circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) to long-range excitonic interactions inside a helical aggregate is investigated. It is found to persist even in the presence of strong energetic disorder and coupling of the exciton to molecular vibrations, when the emitting exciton is localized to only a few chromophores. The CPL dissymmetry, g(lum), is found to depend on a modulated sum over the excitonic couplings, ∑(n,s)J(n,n+s)s sin(φs), where J(n,n+s) is the coupling between molecules separated by s lattice spacings and φ is the pitch angle between adjacent chromophores. The validity of this relation is confirmed through full-scale numerical simulations of helical MPOV4 aggregates using the disordered Holstein Hamiltonian. In addition, an analytical expression for g(lum) is obtained for a helical chain containing a single, energetically detuned chromophore to represent strong disorder. Subsequently, the resulting expression is generalized to include full distributed disorder. Our results demonstrate that the spatial dependence of extended interactions can be extracted from experimental spectra, without having details on disorder or exciton-vibrational coupling.

We present an account of the optical properties of the Frenkel excitons in self-assembled porphyrin tubular aggregates that represent an analog to natural photosynthetic antennae. Using a combination of ultrafast optical spectroscopy and stochastic exciton modeling, we address both linear and nonlinear exciton absorption, band) resulting from strong intermolecular coupling in these aggregates could potentially facilitate efficient energy transfer, fast relaxation due to defects and disorder probably present a major limitation for exciton transport over large distances. 3 Keywords:Frenkel exciton, biomimetic photosynthetic antennae, ultrafast spectroscopy, stochastic exciton modeling 4

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