No abstract

The remarkable ability of migratory birds to navigate accurately using the geomagnetic field for journeys of thousands of kilometres is currently thought to arise from radical pair reactions inside a protein called cryptochrome. In this article, we explain the quantum mechanical basis of the radical pair mechanism and why it is currently the dominant theory of compass magnetoreception. We also provide a brief account of two important computational simulation techniques that are used to study the mechanism in cryptochrome: spin dynamics and molecular dynamics. At the end, we provide an overview of current research on quantum mechanical processes in avian cryptochromes and the computational models for describing them.

The magnetic compass of migratory birds is thought to rely on a radical pair reaction inside the blue-light photoreceptor protein cryptochrome. The sensitivity of such a sensor to weak external magnetic fields is determined by a variety of magnetic interactions, including electron-nuclear hyperfine interactions. Here, we investigate the implications of thermal motion, focusing on fluctuations in the dihedral and librational angles of flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) and tryptophan (Trp) radicals in cryptochrome 4a from European robin (Erithacus rubecula, ErCry4a) and pigeon (Columba livia, ClCry4a) and cryptochrome 1 from the plant Arabidopsis thaliana (AtCry1). Molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory-derived hyperfine interactions are used to calculate the quantum yield of radical pair recombination dependent on the direction of the geomagnetic field. This quantity and various dynamical parameters are compared for [FAD •− Trp •+ ] in ErCry4a, ClCry4a, and AtCry1, with TrpC or TrpD being the third and fourth components of the tryptophan triad/tetrad in the respective proteins. We find that (i) differences in the average dihedral angles in the radical pairs are small, (ii) the librational motions of TrpC •+ in the avian cryptochromes are appreciably smaller than in AtCry1, (iii) the rapid vibrational motions of the radicals leading to strong fluctuations in the hyperfine couplings affect the spin dynamics depending on the usage of instantaneous or time-averaged interactions. Future investigations of radical pair compass sensitivity should therefore not be based on single snapshots of the protein structure but should include the ensemble properties of the hyperfine interactions.

The basic entanglement-swapping scheme can be seen as a process which allows to redistribute the Bell states' properties between different pairs of a four qubits system. Achieving the task requires performing a von Neumann measurement, which projects a pair of factorized qubits randomly onto one of the four Bell states. In this work we propose a similar scheme, by performing the same Bell-von Neumann measurement over two local qubits, each one initially being correlated through an X-state with a spatially distant qubit. This process swaps the X-feature without conditions, whereas the input entanglement is partially distributed in the four possible outcome states under certain conditions. Specifically, we obtain two threshold values for the input entanglement in order for the outcome states to be nonseparable. Besides, we find that there are two possible amounts of outcome entanglement, one is greater and the other less than the input entanglement; the probability of obtaining the greatest outcome entanglement is smaller than the probability of achieving the least one. In addition, we illustrate the distribution of the entanglement for some particular and interesting initial X-states.