Re: OT: light altering paint for greenhouses could help lengthen fruit growing season in the UK

On 24/11/2024 06:43, Jan Panteltje wrote:

Light-altering paint for greenhouses could help lengthen the fruit growing season in the UK
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241120122018.htm
Summary:
  New spray developed by scientists could help boost UK farming and increase the UK's food security.
 Paper:
  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/admt.202400977
 stuff they use, quote:
'
  In this paper, we develop an approach based on readily prepared and cheap
  Eu3+-containing polyoxotitanium cages (Eu-POTs) which, we show,
  possess the necessary design features listed before.
  Having established the ground rules for selective modification,
  we introduce a working prototype luminophore with high PLQY (>60%)
  which is soluble in a range of commercial plastics, including water-based
  acrylic paint that can be sprayed onto conventional glass greenhouses
  in an agricultural environment.

There are other much older organic dye technologies that will down convert blue photons to red like dayglo dyes  Eosin, Rhodamine, Rubrene etc (although some of them are a bit carcingenic others are quite harmless). They form the basis for pumped tunable dye lasers.
Plants are green because the very first photosynthetic life on earth had already grabbed the low hanging fruit of energetic green and blue photons using rhodopsin based proton pumps and red photosynthetic pigments. You can still see them living in rock pool puddles today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_rhodopsin
And a closely related pigment lives on in our eyes in various slightly different forms giving us colour vision.
--
Martin Brown