Entanglement and intra-molecular cooling in biological systems? - A quantum thermodynamic perspective

腔内与腔外压缩光同时作用的光机械冷却

Optomechanical cooling with simultaneous intracavity and extracavity squeezed light

本文提出利用腔内简并光学参量放大与腔外压缩光驱动的联合压缩方案，通过量子干涉抑制斯托克斯加热并增强反斯托克斯冷却，在深度未分辨边带条件下实现机械振子高效基态冷却，显著提升冷却速率并降低耦合强度要求。

Intracavity-squeezed optomechanical cooling

Quantum ground-state cooling of macroscopic mechanical resonators is of essential importance to both fundamental physics and applied science. Conventional method of laser cooling is limited by the quantum backaction, which requires mechanical sideband resolved in order to cool to ground state. This work presents an idea to break the quantum backaction limit by engineering intracavity optical squeezing. It gives rise to quantum interference for all the dissipation channels, and under certain circumstances can totally remove the influence of the cavity dissipation and the resultant quantum backa…

Quantum coherent contributions in biological electron transfer

Many biological electron transfer (ET) reactions are mediated by metal centres in proteins. NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase (complex I) contains an intramolecular chain of seven iron-sulphur (FeS) clusters, one of the longest chains of metal centres in biology and a test case for physical models of intramolecular ET. In biology, intramolecular ET is commonly described as a diffusive hopping process, according to the semi-classical theories of Marcus and Hopfield. However, recent studies have raised the possibility that non-trivial quantum mechanical effects play a functioning role in certain bi…

Back-action ground state cooling of a micromechanical membrane via intensity-dependent interaction

We propose a theoretical scheme to show the possibility of achieving the quantum ground state cooling of a vibrating micromechanical membrane inside a high finesse optical cavity by back-action cooling approach. The scheme is based on an intensity-dependent coupling of the membrane to the intracavity radiation pressure field. We find the exact expression for the position and momentum variances of the membrane by solving the linearized quantum Langevin equations in the steady-state, conditioned by the Routh-Hurwitz criterion. We show that by varying the Lamb-Dicke parameter and the membrane's r…

Metabolic limits on classical information processing by biological cells

Biological information processing is generally assumed to be classical. Measured cellular energy budgets of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, however, fall orders of magnitude short of the power required to maintain classical states of protein conformation and localization at the Å, fs scales predicted by single-molecule decoherence calculations and assumed by classical molecular dynamics models. We suggest that decoherence is limited to the immediate surroundings of the cell membrane and of intercompartmental boundaries within the cell, and that bulk cellular biochemistry implements quantum in…

Demon-like Algorithmic Quantum Cooling and its Realization with Quantum Optics

The simulation of low-temperature properties of many-body systems remains one of the major challenges in theoretical and experimental quantum information science. We present, and demonstrate experimentally, a universal cooling method which is applicable to any physical system that can be simulated by a quantum computer. This method allows us to distill and eliminate hot components of quantum states, i.e., a quantum Maxwell's demon. The experimental implementation is realized with a quantum-optical network, and the results are in full agreement with theoretical predictions (with fidelity higher…