Driven spin dynamics enhances cryptochrome magnetoreception: Towards live quantum sensing

Abstract

The mechanism underlying magnetoreception has long eluded explanation. A popular hypothesis attributes this sense to the quantum coherent spin dynamics of spin-selective recombination reactions of radical pairs in the protein cryptochrome. However, concerns about the validity of the hypothesis have been raised as unavoidable inter-radical interactions, such as strong electron-electron dipolar coupling, appear to suppress its sensitivity. We demonstrate that this can be overcome by driving the spin system through a modulation of the inter-radical distance. It is shown that this dynamical process markedly enhances geomagnetic field sensitivity in strongly coupled radical pairs via a Landau-Zener type transition between singlet and triplet states. These findings suggest that a "live" harmonically driven magnetoreceptor can be more sensitive than its "dead" static counterpart.

7 pages, 4 figures, in addition to Supporting Material of 15 pages and 12 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Perspective: Numerically "exact" approach to open quantum dynamics: The hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM)
• Nonadiabatic Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana transitions, dynamics, and interference
• The sensitivity of a radical pair compass magnetoreceptor can be significantly amplified by radical scavengers
• Spin relaxation in radical pairs from the stochastic Schrödinger equation
• Floquet theory of radical pairs in radiofrequency magnetic fields
• Observations about utilitarian coherence in the avian compass

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Majorana's approach to nonadiabatic transitions validates the adiabatic-impulse approximation
• Quantum Control of Radical Pair Dynamics beyond Time-Local Optimization
• On the optimality of the radical-pair quantum compass
• Fröhlich versus Bose-Einstein Condensation in Pumped Bosonic Systems
• Mind the Gap: From Resolving Theoretical Foundations of Chiral(ity)-Induced Spin Selectivity to Pioneering Implementations in Quantum Sensing
• A near-term quantum simulation of the transverse field Ising model hints at Glassy Dynamics
• RinQ: Towards predicting central sites in proteins on current quantum computers
• Engineering the uncontrollable: Steering noisy spin-correlated radical-pairs with coherent and incoherent control
• Interradical motion can push magnetosensing precision towards quantum limits
• Application of Optimal Control to Time-Resolution Protocol for Quantum Sensing