Quantum Coherence in Biology

Alexandra Olaya-Castro

Nicolaos E. Mavromatos, A. Keith Powell

Erhard Bieberich

Iannis K. Kominis

Radical-pair reactions pertinent to biological magnetic field sensing are an ideal system for demonstrating the paradigm of quantum biology, the exploration of quantum coherence effects in complex biological systems.We here provide yet another fundamental connection between this biochemical spin system and quantum information science.We introduce and explore a formal measure quantifying the singlet-triplet coherence of radical pairs using the concept of quantum relative entropy.The ability to quantify singlet-triplet coherence opens up a number of possibilities in the study of magnetic sensing with radical pairs.We first use the explicit quantification of singlet-triplet coherence to affirmatively address the major premise of quantum biology, namely, that quantum coherence provides an operational advantage to magnetoreception.Second, we use the concept of incoherent operations to show that incoherent manipulations of nuclear spins can have a dire effect on singlet-triplet coherence when the radical pair exhibits electronic-nuclear entanglement.Finally, we unravel subtle effects related to exchange interactions and their role in promoting quantum coherence.

Sergey Nikolaevich Mayburov

Ross Dorner, John Goold, Vlatko Vedral

Recent advances in the spectroscopy of biomolecules have highlighted the possibility of quantum coherence playing an active role in biological energy transport. The revelation that quantum coherence can survive in the hot and wet environment of biology has generated a lively debate across both the physics and biology communities. In particular, it remains unclear to what extent non-trivial quantum effects are used in biology and what advantage, if any, they afford. We propose an analogue quantum simulator, based on currently available techniques in ultra-cold atom physics, to study a model of energy and electron transport based on the Holstein Hamiltonian. By simulating the salient aspects of a biological system in a tunable laboratory set-up, we hope to gain insight into the validity of several theoretical models of biological quantum transport in a variety of relevant parameter regimes.