Abstract
We give a new explanation for why some biological systems can stay quantum coherent for a long time at room temperature, one of the fundamental puzzles of quantum biology. We show that systems with the right level of complexity between chaos and regularity can increase their coherence time by orders of magnitude. Systems near Critical Quantum Chaos or Metal-Insulator Transition (MIT) can have long coherence times and coherent transport at the same time. The new theory tested in a realistic light harvesting system model can reproduce the scaling of critical fluctuations reported in recent experiments. Scaling of return probability in the FMO light harvesting complex shows the signs of universal return probability decay observed at critical MIT. The results may open up new possibilities to design low loss energy and information transport systems in this Poised Realm hovering reversibly between quantum coherence and classicality.
Highlights
Discovery of room temperature quantum coherence in the avian compass [1] of birds, in the olfactory receptors [2] and in light harvesting complexes [3,4,5,6] in the last few years indicate that quantum effects might be ubiquitous in biological systems
While the quantum chemical understanding of the details of light harvesting systems is almost complete, no organizing principle has been found which could explain why quantum coherence is maintained in these systems for much longer than the characteristic decoherence time imposed by their room temperature environment
We demonstrate on a ring of chromophores that coherence in the critical point decays with the same non-trivial power law as in the FMO complex experiment [5]
Summary
Discovery of room temperature quantum coherence in the avian compass [1] of birds, in the olfactory receptors [2] and in light harvesting complexes [3,4,5,6] in the last few years indicate that quantum effects might be ubiquitous in biological systems. Quantum systems changing from integrable to quantum chaotic pass through critical quantum chaos [7,8,9,10] which is a metalinsulator transition from Anderson localization to extended wave functions. By extending the semiclassical theory of decoherence from chaotic [11,12,13,14,15,16,17] and integrable systems [18] to the transition region we show that coherence decay changes from exponential to power law behavior and coherence time is amplified exponentially from its environmentally determined value.
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