Quantum Biology Yields Evidence of Superradiance and its Potential for Quantum Information Processing

Illustration of a molecular network by Dimitrous Christou on Pixabay.

By James Myers

A study published in April 2024 sheds new light on quantum mechanisms at the tiniest scale that biological cells use to transmit signals for their operation.

The researchers studied intracellular networks of tryptophan, which is an amino acid common to biological systems, and observed the responses of surrounding cells when the tryptophan was excited with ultraviolet light.

The chemical structure of tryptophan, which is an amino acid with a unique property of fluorescence. Image: Wikipedia .

Amino acids like tryptophan are the building blocks of proteins essential to living organisms, and a special property of tryptophan is its fluorescence. After absorbing ultraviolet light, tryptophan molecules emit light at different energy levels, and the scientists observed interactions of cells to the light radiating from the tryptophan.

By analyzing the collective interactions in one structure of a tryptophan network, the study’s authors were able to predict the formation of “strongly superradiant states.”

Superradiance is the phenomenon in quantum optics where the energy output of excited objects like tryptophan molecules is greater than the energy input. Instead of losing energy over time, the output is amplified by cooperation between the excited molecules and their surrounding environment.

In the experiment, superradiant states were achieved with as many as 100,000 dipoles (which are essentially positive and negative energy receptors) in the microtubule networks of cells that are activated by tryptophan fluorescence.

With the help of motor proteins on their surfaces, microtubules transport materials within cells while they also serve as part of the cellular skeleton. Image: By Pakorn Kanchanawong and Clare Waterman, on Wikipedia .

The researchers explain that the reaction of microtubules in the cells “leads to an enhancement of the fluorescence quantum yield (QY) that is confirmed by our experiments.” Quantum yield is a measure of superradiance expressed as a ratio of light particles emitted to light particles input; a ratio that is close to 1 indicates efficient energy radiance, and when it reaches 1 the ratio indicates that all energy input is radiated out with no loss.

In living multicellular organisms, cellular operation is restricted by the amount of energy the body can supply to them.

The body can take in and create only a limited amount of energy for its operation, so the biological methods for cells to issue and process instructions must be far more efficient than energy-hungry artificial neural networks that are at the heart of large language models like Chat-GPT. While artificial neural networks use only electricity to transmit signals, cells employ the quantum properties of molecules like tryptophan to broadcast and receive instructions more efficiently due to superradiance.

“I believe that our work is a quantum leap for quantum biology, taking us beyond photosynthesis and into other realms of exploration: investigating implications for quantum information processing, and discovering new therapeutic approaches for complex diseases,” said Dr. Philip Kurian, one of the study’s authors who is the founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Philip Kurian, theoretical physicist at Howard University. Image: Quantum Biology Laboratory.

Its website states that the Quantum Biology Laboratory’s mission is to explore “fundamental questions at the nexus of quantum theory, electrodynamics, and biosystems, with a view toward transformative global impact.” The site lists several of the laboratory’s research projects, such as “Electrodynamic Synchronization of Biomolecular Behavior” and “Superradiant Effects in Biological Architectures of Multi-Level Chromophores.”

One example of a transformative effect that received a major boost from the discovery of the tryptophan superradiance phenomenon is the prevention and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

It is believed that the discovery could assist in preventing and treating medical conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia that are caused by the accumulation of improperly configured proteins in the brain.

The site News Medical quotes Michael Levin, director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, on the study’s findings. “The Kurian group and coworkers have enriched our understanding of information flows in biology at the quantum level. Such quantum optical networks are widespread, not only in neural systems but broadly throughout the web of life. The remarkable properties of this signaling and information-processing modality could be hugely relevant for evolutionary, physical, and computational biology.”

The cytoskeleton of eurkaryotic species like all animals and plants. The skeleton protects the cell’s nucleus, with the microtubules coloured green. Image: Wikipedia .

The Quantum Record reported last March, in Science Probes the Frontiers of Quantum and Mathematical Consciousness, on a 2023 study by physical chemists Aarat Kalra and Gregory Scholes who used a fluorescent dye to track the path of energy propagating through the brain’s microtubules. Kalra and Scholes were surprised that “energy diffused about five times further than expected according to classical calculations, suggesting a quantum phenomenon was at play in the microtubules. ‘It’s likely some kind of quantum resonance,’ says Scholes.”

The 2024 paper co-authored by Philip Kurian states that the superradiance of tryptophan networks can be explained by their extraordinarily broad range of emission, “strongly coupling the system with the electromagnetic field. Such strong coupling protects the system from disorder, which must become comparable to the coupling in magnitude to suppress superradiance.”

The researchers acknowledge that the discovery adds another challenge to the problem of transmitting information at the quantum scale in the presence of environmental disturbances from heat and electromagnetic energy. They note, “Significant disorder can effectively quench collective superradiance effects.”

Disorder in information transmission is a challenge that quantum computer developers are working hard to achieve, with much recent success.

A unique property of quantum systems is that the information they contain exists in two states simultaneously, encompassing all probabilities of both states. By contrast, the bits of computers now commonly used can exist in only one state – either “on” (1) or “off” (0) – at a time. The vast speed and calculation potential of the quantum computer is due to its transmission of signals simultaneously in both “on” and “off” states without requiring time to switch between them, a phenomenon known as “superposition.”

The qubit, represented as a Bloch sphere in which the “off” state at 0 exists in line with the “on” state at 1, with both opposites meeting at a single point where the x, y, and z axes converge in the middle of the sphere. Image: Wikipedia.

The problem in creating a fully-functional quantum computer is the delicate state in which the quantum bits, or “qubits,” exist and the susceptibility of their circuits to disconnection caused by environmental interference. Major strides are being made in resolving the problem (see our December article, Significant Steps Have Been Taken Toward Our Quantum Computing Future), but much work is still required to connect enough qubits in larger circuits for the machine’s outputs to be of practical use.

Indications of quantum processes in the brain, whose wet, electrically charged, and heat-filled environment was long thought to prohibit stable quantum connections, could provide a significant boost to the science of quantum information processing, as Dr. Kurian stated.

The idea of quantum information processing in the brain was advanced by mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose in his 1998 book The Emperor’s New Consciousness.

Penrose, who received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the mathematics of black holes, has argued that consciousness is not a computable process but instead operates in an “orchestrated objective reduction” (Orch-OR) of quantum processes in the brain. He wrote that when successive quantum connections between observer and observed become separated by more than one Planck length, which is the minimum length in the universe, the result is a collapse of the quantum wavefunction.

In transmitting information, the quantum wavefunction encompasses all probabilities arising from combinations of opposite states (in the quantum computer’s case, “on” and “off” combinations), and so the wavefunction collapse reduces many probabilities to one single certainty. Penrose advanced the proposition that a record of the wavefunction collapse, and therefore a record of the observation, is registered or ‘imprinted’ in a unique position that forms part of the curvature of the fabric of space and time.

Is there a connection between quantum biology, quantum consciousness, and the observer effect?

Philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers set out the idea of the “hard problem of consciousness.” Image by Danny Golcman, on Wikipedia.

What philosopher David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness is our inability to explain how we, as observers, can experience things at the same time that we observe those things. The observed things are the objects, and therefore the causes, of our observations. Our subjective experience of those objects is the effect of observation, and both cause and effect exist at precisely the same time. The problem is that the laws of physics don’t allow cause and effect to exist simultaneously.

How can we be conscious of the properties of anything that we observe at the precise moment when we observe it? As Chalmers worded the hard problem of simultaneous observation and experience, “. . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?”

The hard problem might be viewed as a quantum problem, arising from what has long been known as the “observer effect.” The reasons for the observer effect are not known, but what is known is that when we observe a quantum process like the scattering of light particles, the observed outcome is different from the outcome of the same process if it’s not observed. (For more on the observer effect, see our feature The Observer Effect: Why Do Our Measurements Change Quantum Outcomes?)

Although it’s not possible for physical objects like a human observer and an observed object to co-exist at the same time without invoking the observer effect, simultaneity of cause and effect is a feature of the quantum realm. At the tiniest quantum scale, the phenomenon of superposition places opposite states at precisely the same point, and that’s what makes quantum computers such powerfully fast calculators.

Giulio Tononi advanced Integrated Information Theory. Dr. Tononi is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness, at the University of Wisconsin. Image: University of Wisconsin.

However, a recent paper by John Sanfey, entitled Conscious Causality, Observer-Observed Simultaneity, and the Problem of Time for Integrated Information Theory, argues that while the opposite states of observer and observed do exist at the same point in space, it’s not necessarily the case that they also exist at the same point in time. Existing at a different time, consciousness would act as a cause in time that’s separate from the physical cause in space. There would be, as a result, two causes that combine in different measures to create one effect at a single point in the fabric of spacetime. (For more on spacetime curvature, see our December article, Will We Find a Universal Memory for All Physical Scales, From the Tiny Quantum to Giant Stars, in the Geometry of Curves?)

The quantum (the plural is “quanta”), which is used by the quantum computer to transmit its signals, is the smallest amount of energy in the universe that can cause change or be changed. While there remains no generally agreed definition of consciousness, most definitions recognize it as an agent of change. The question is, does our agency penetrate to the very core, the quantum energy foundation of the universe?

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a controversial framework for consciousness advanced in 2004 by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. The theory proposes that consciousness holds properties identical to those of the object, or cause, of a conscious observation. IIT says that since subjective consciousness is equal to its objective cause, the conscious capacity of a system could be determined by understanding its complete ability to act as a cause. Knowing a system’s causal powers would therefore lead to knowledge of the system’s conscious experience.

The question of whether consciousness is computable, as IIT proposes, or non-computable as Roger Penrose holds, may not be answered for a very long time, if ever. However, as knowledge of quantum biology progresses and phenomena like superradiance are further investigated, the reasons for the quantum observer effect might become clear.

Discovering the reasons for and mechanisms of the quantum observer effect could put us much closer to understanding the mysterious thing called consciousness that goes on in our minds.

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