Photosynthesis is awesome and learning about it can only help solar research since it's had a lot of the engineering kinks worked out of it. This article shows just how damn efficient it really is. It's a pretty technical piece but if you can follow it, it's impressive as hell.
Nutshell version of article: Light hits the photosynthesis chemical. Parts of the chemical oscillate at different energies. These oscillations interfere in a quantum way (over many possible frequencies) and the one with the best resonance (the oscillations that get along best) wins. This optimal interference is how the energy gets transfered.