Identity of Quanta

Hans Luth

Philip Ball

Mikio Nakahara

Christopher Rose, Shahzad I. Mian, Ruochen Song

We consider mutual information between release times and capture times for a set of M identical quanta traveling independently from a source to a target. The quanta are immediately captured upon arrival, first-passage times are assumed independent and identically distributed and the quantum emission times are constrained by a deadline. The primary application area is intended to be inter/intracellular molecular signaling in biological systems whereby an organelle, cell or group of cells must deliver some message (such as transcription or developmental instructions) over distance with reasonable certainty to another organelles, cells or group of cells. However, the model can also be applied to communications systems wherein indistinguishable signals have random transit latencies.

Jonathan Allday, Simon Hands

In quantum theory, and especially quantum field theory, the nature of quantum states is transformed if the particles are identical. In fact, the impact of particles (or better quanta) being identical is more profound in quantum theory than in classical mechanics. Their identity has direct experimental consequences over and above those related to the occupation of states. Over the next couple of chapters, we will explore the quantum theory of identical particles to draw out the impact on the entropy of a collection of such particles .