Vibrations, quanta and biology

By Susana F. Huelga, Martin Bodo Plenio. 2013

531 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Quantum biology is an emerging field of research that concerns itself with the experimental and theoretical exploration of non-trivial quantum phenomena in biological systems. In this tutorial overview we aim to bring out fundamental assumptions and questions in the field, identify basic design principles and develop a key underlying theme – the dynamics of quantum dynamical networks in the presence of an environment and the fruitful interplay that the two may enter. At the hand of three biological phenomena whose understanding is held to require quantum mechanical processes, namely excitation and charge transfer in photosynthetic complexes, magneto-reception in birds and the olfactory sense, we demonstrate that this underlying theme encompasses them all, thus suggesting its wider relevance as an archetypical framework for quantum biology.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fb506751ebd8d7b063b48b2552a8ccea3a87ceb

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

The Radical-Pair Mechanism of Magnetoreception. (2016, background): “The quantum nature of the radical-pair hypothesis has attracted the interest of theoreticians (7, 27, 56, 75, 101, 105, 154, 191, 218) and has been highlighted in several reviews (81, 104, 126, 219), popular science articles (6, 196), and a book (5) on the emerging field of quantum biology.”
Manipulating matter by strong coupling to vacuum fields (2021, background): “Here, the role of coherence in collective coupling (118, 119) could open perspectives for quantum biology (120, 121).”
Quantum processes which do not use coherence (2015, background): “The assumption of incoherent outputs is relevant in situations such as transport mechanisms, where one is interested in the probability that an excitation is located at a specific site after a certain amount of time [30, 31].”
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics in the strong coupling and non-Markovian regime based on a reaction coordinate mapping (2016, result): “At this point it is noteworthy that similar models have been also used in quantum biology to model lightharvesting complexes [72, 73].”