| dc.description.abstract |
Recently there has been growing interest in the application
of quantum mechanics to understand many biological
phenomena such as photosynthesis [1–7], the process of
olfaction [8,9], enzymatic reactions [10,11], and avian
magnetoreception [12–15]. These interests have brought
physicists, chemists, and biologists to the same platform
and led to the beginning of a new interdisciplinary subject
called quantum biology [16,17]. A major motivation of
these studies is to understand how nature utilizes purely
quantum phenomena to optimize various biological
processes.
Here we are specifically interested in avian magnetoreception.
It is very plausible that the navigation ability of
some migratory birds is governed by the mechanism based
on geomagnetic-dependent dynamics of spins of unpaired
electrons in a radical pair. A recent theoretical study has
estimated both the lifetime of the pair and the coherence
time of this dynamics to be of the order of tens of microseconds
[15]. The basic criterion used there postulates that
bird’s navigation is disturbed if the signal produced by the
dynamics is independent of the orientation of the geomagnetic
field. This criterion together with the results of behavioral
experiments in which European robins could not
navigate in a weak oscillating magnetic field [18,19] led
to the estimated life time and coherence time. Here we
additionally take into account the results of other behavioral
experiments in which the same species were observed
to be temporarily disoriented in a constant magnetic field
sufficiently stronger or weaker than the geomagnetic field
[20,21]. We estimate the lifetime and coherence time of
the order of several microseconds. |
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