Iannis Kominis Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
University of Crete
Heraklion, Greece

Monday, April 2, 2012
3:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

Radical-ion pair reactions play a fundamental role in photosynthesis and are also understood to underlie the avian magnetic compass mechanism. It was recently shown that these biochemical reactions exhibit a host of "non-trivial" quantum effects, thus providing a promising and very exciting link between biological systems and quantum information science. We will review the recent progress in understanding the fundamental quantum dynamics of radical-ion-pair reactions and elaborate on the possible repercussions of the new findings for the field of quantum biology.