Hore, Peter

Tuesday April 16, 2013
Time: 16:45
Place: ETH Science City, HPV G 5
Host: Atac Imamoglu

Coffee and tea at 16:15

Do birds use entangled spins in their magnetic compass sensor?

Peter J. Hore
Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford

Most physical scientists would probably treat with scepticism the suggestion that a chemical reaction could respond to a magnetic field as weak as the Earth’s. After all, the energy of interaction of a molecule with a ~50 mT magnetic field is more than a million times smaller than kBT at room temperature, which in turn is 10-100 times smaller than the strength of a chemical bond. Nevertheless, the kinetics of certain chemical reactions are magnetically sensitive. The key molecular species are pairs of transient free radicals whose electron-nuclear spin systems evolve coherently under the influence of internal and external magnetic interactions.

In this seminar, I will discuss the proposal that the coherent quantum spin-dynamics of photo-induced radical pairs in cryptochromes (photo-active proteins) could be the mechanism of the light-dependent magnetic compass sense of migratory birds and other animals.