Optimizing molecular photoswitches for solar energy harvesting

Molecular photoswitches that can both convert and store energy could be used to make solar energy harvesting more efficient. A team of researchers has used a quantum computing method to find a particularly efficient molecular structure for this purpose. As the team describe in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, their procedure was based on a dataset of more than 400,000 molecules, which they screened to find the optimum molecular structure for solar energy storage materials.