Explaining the avian compass through sustained quantum dynamics in driven, open three-radical systems

In the past 25-years, we have witnessed the emergence of quantum technologies, including quantum computers or simulators, from a scientific dream to reality. Google's claim to have achieved quantum supremacy has spurred the global race toward harnessing the quantum advantage. The next major advance, enabled by the applications of quantum computers, may become a reality within decades.

The breakthrough hinges on one fundamental imperative: the need to sustain quantum superpositions and, crucially, entanglement in noisy environments.

Has nature evolved to exploit quantum phenomena in ways that surpass current technologies? Could truly quantum effects operate in the warm, wet and noisy environment that is characteristic of life? Does this provide a decisive advantage over "classical" processes? Indeed, evidence accumulated over the last four decades does support a conclusion that various organisms employ coherent quantum dynamics to enable magnetoreception: the ability to sense the geomagnetic field.

Yet, it remains to be shown exactly how coherent quantum effects can operate in the warm, wet, and noisy surroundings that are characteristic of biology. Previous studies provided a conceptual model, but failed to rationalize the sustained quantum coherence that is believed to enable this exquisite sensitivity to the magnetic field. We believe this failure is a consequence of an inadequate description of the biological environment, i.e. the openness of the quantum system as it is coupled to the protein motion-a deficit which we here shall overcome.

This treatment will explain how living systems could exercise the benefit of a quantum effect to provide a decisive advantage to life. We will do this by focusing, for the first time on systems of radical pairs and three radicals, for which we hope to be able to demonstrate that radical motion can amplify magnetic field effects and sustain quantum dynamics, if the system is driven to a metastable state not accessible in closed-system formulations.