Speaker
Description
The complexity of biological environments is often assumed to act as a source of detrimental noise, destroying delicate quantum effects and potentially negating the need for quantum descriptions. However, their inherent structure may instead provide a resource that nature harnesses to steer quantum dynamics towards biological function. In this talk, I explore this idea by showing how realistic complexity is essential for scrutinising the predictions of idealised models and can reveal new mechanisms that enable functionality. Focusing on radical pair systems, which are proposed to act as quantum magnetosensors within the protein cryptochrome and hypothesised to underlie magnetoreception, I examine how environmental structure can influence and enhance magnetic field sensitivity and metrological performance. These results emphasise the importance of open quantum systems approaches that temper physical insight with sufficient realism and suggest how environmental structure may be harnessed by nature to steer biochemical processes and leveraged in engineered systems.