MERLIN SCIENCE — Asymmetric Dynamics Break Symmetry in Posner Molecule's Nuclear Spin H — E8 Intelligence Research

Andrew Stewart Caldin

Published Oct 26, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

The finding, in one clean sentence: the Posner molecule's nuclear spin ensemble, long imagined as a high-symmetry quantum processor, is dynamically asymmetric—its accessible state space is smaller and less symmetric than the full permutation group would allow. Here's the field context. For years, the Posner molecule—Ca₉(PO₄)₆—has been a favorite candidate for biological quantum information, with calcium and phosphorus nuclear spins proposed as qubits. The naive picture treats all nine calcium sites and six phosphate groups as interchangeable, giving a Hilbert space of (8)⁹ times (2)⁶, roughly 8.6 billion dimensions. That's the idealized symmetry you'd get if every Ca²⁺ and PO₄³⁻ unit were truly equivalent. But chemistry is not that generous. Now the mechanism, and I'll keep it faithful to the paper. The molecule's internal Hamiltonian—dipolar and scalar couplings mediated by the phosphate tetrahedra—does not respect the full S₉ × S₆ permutation symmetry. The actual crystallographic p Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23658544

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