Does photosynthesis occur only in the visible spectrum? If there is a way to completely remove all other electromagnetic bands from the sunlight, including infrared (IR), will photosynthesis continue to occur?
Is there any known plant (algae, fungi, bryophytes, pteridophytes, gymnosperms and angiosperms) that utilises the other wavelengths for photosynthesis?
Photosynthesis is nearly all visible light. There's usually not enough UV and thermodynamics more or less rules out infrared. Chris covered that pretty spectacularly, but that nearly is significant.
There is some evidence that certain kinds of fungi can use gamma rays or other ionizing radiation for energy, but they're not particularly common. Melanin is used instead of chlorophyll, but apparently 'tooling up' for radiosynthesis(is that a word?) is fairly hard on the cell. It was assumed the melanin was a protective pigment(like it is in humans) and produced only when necessary(also like humans), but these particular ones were discovered growing in the Chernobyl reactor and apparently evolved to continuously produce melanin and absorb ionizing radiation for food. They don't stop producing melanin even on the verge of starvation. Other melanized fungi live in high-radiation environments, like mountaintops and the poles, where there is more UV and cosmic rays and things.
Fun fact aside: Fossilized melanized fungal spores turn up at the K-T boundary when the earth had no magnetic field and therefore higher radiation flux at the surface (see paper linked above and Hulot & Gallet, 2003 for more).
Photosynthesis only occurs in the visible light.have a look at the absorption spectra of the different pigments involved in photosynthesis, you see that all these pigments absorb light between 400 and 700nm (from a diagram from here):
You see that the absorption spectra of chlorophyll a and b are located from 400 to 500nm and again from 630 to 700nm. The maxima for both molecules are different so that the light is used more efficiently.
The other three important light harvesting pigments involved in photosynthesis (in cyanobacteria and plants) are: Beta Carotene, Phycoerythrin and Phycocyanin. These use different parts of the visible spectrum (hence the different color of cyanobacteria), but they still only use the visible part of the light between 400 and 700nm.
The reason for this can be seen in the figure when you look at the intensity of the sunlight (plotted in black). All photosynthesis occurs in the area of the highest intensity. Wavelengths shorter than 350nm are efficiently blocked by our atmosphere, wavelengths much longer are not transporting much energy.
To shortly answer your question: If we could "switch off" all other wavelengths from the spectrum, there would still be photosynthesis on earth.
