Building better bridges for moving energy with DNA

Scientists at Arizona State University have developed a new type of nanostructure that mimics certain natural light-harvesting systems. The nanostructure serves as a bridge to move energy generated by light-absorbing molecules to light-emitting molecules. The transfer has almost no energy loss (less than 1%), which means the bridge can carry energy over distances of hundreds of nanometers. This research provides a new approach for transferring energy efficiently over long nanowires and has potential applications in photonic networks, which are widely used in communications and information processing.