Philip Kurian (2023) Cooperative and coherent quantum phenomena in the life sciences
Cooperative and coherent quantum phenomena in the life sciences.
Dr Philip Kurian, Quantum Biology Laboratory, Howard University.
The Guy Foundation 2023 Spring Series.
Abstract
Networks of tryptophan – an aromatic amino acid with strong fluorescent response – are ubiquitous in biological systems, forming diverse architectures in transmembrane proteins, cytoskeletal filaments, sub-neuronal elements, photoreceptor complexes, virion capsids, and other cellular structures. We analyzed the cooperative effects induced by ultraviolet (UV) excitation of several biologically relevant tryptophan mega-networks, thus giving insight into novel mechanisms for cellular photoprotection, signalling, and control. Our theoretical analysis in the single-excitation manifold predicts the formation of strongly superradiant states due to collective interactions among organized arrangements of up to more than 100,000 tryptophan UV-excited transition dipoles in microtubule architectures, which leads to an enhancement of the fluorescence quantum yield that is confirmed by our experiments. We demonstrated the observed consequences of this superradiant behavior in the fluorescence quantum yield for hierarchically organized tubulin structures, which increases in different geometric regimes at thermal equilibrium before saturation – highlighting the effect's persistence in the presence of significant physiological disorder. Our results motivate a revisiting of conventional assumptions about the computing limits of cytoskeletal and neuronal architectures, which are generally considered to signal via Hodgkin-Huxley action potentials (millisecond timescale). We show that these biosystems can harness superradiant effects (picosecond timescale) in tryptophan lattices to process orders of magnitude more information than exascale supercomputers, at significantly lower power consumptions, by operating extremely close to the Landauer bound for logically irreversible operations. We then conclude with a discussion of quantum information processing and the robustness of single-photon-excited superradiant states paired with subradiant states (second timescale) in biology, offering a novel paradigm for understanding large collectives of quantum emitters in warm, wet, and wiggly environments.
Read the full 2023 Spring Series Proceedings here - https://www.theguyfoundation.org/wp-c...
Start: 00:00
Betony Adams (introduction): 02:18
Dr Philip Kurian: 08:52
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