research keywords

During Prof. Yablonovitch's class, I'm amazed by the striking similarities and pecularities of luminescene properties of dye molecule (conjugated molecules) and semiconductor.
Together with the theme of biomolecules as evolving, smart machines (and also the "why left-handedness?" question) from my biophysics class, I'm inclined to mainstorm some recent concepts I found interesting:

fluctuation-dissipation theory: stochastic model
noise/randomness that contains information (correlation measurement)
vs. single molecule measurement
efficient (quantum) energy transfer
what governs the characteristic time? (phonon relaxation, spin relaxation, fluorescence decay time, coupling to thermal/photon bath, internal conversion, intersystem crossing, vibronic coupling)
photochemistry
photosynthesis (molecular level): how/why efficient, at what energy conversion process? light energy-->chemical or chemical to mechanical/sensory against diffusional force? cooperativity required?

How this all is connected to QED, or is it any helpful (advantage from hierarchical separation, phenominological approach as opposed to reductionist/a priori one)?

aside from nonlinear optics (the power of crystalline semiconductor, OLED), near-field optical techniques I may start to develop to study this?
can we really learn something very practical from biology (or everything is quite predictable by squiggly physical arguments where the answer not very surprising)?