Scientists have found evidence that quantum effects and the peculiar "cousin" of Schrödinger's cat play an important role in the work of photosynthesis in plant cells, which may explain its abnormally high efficiency, according to an article published in the journal Nature Chemistry.
“Our colleagues have shown in the past that vibrations of a quantum nature can occur in the light-sensitive pigments of microbes. Unfortunately, they turned out to be simple vibrations of molecules. We continued to search and checked if there are states similar to Schrödinger's cat in chlorophyll molecules,”said Thomas Jansen from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Plants and bacteria are able to convert light energy into nutrients using the so-called photosystems I and II. The second system captures photons of light and converts them into free electrons, while the first splits water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen ions and uses the latter to assemble nutrient molecules. The work and structure of these systems is well studied, but their interaction and location within the cell remained a mystery to scientists.
The first observations of their work at the level of individual molecules and atoms showed that its "antennas" they absorb light energy and use it to produce ATP molecules, cellular energy, and free electrons, much more efficiently than classical physics predicts. This led scientists to wonder if plants and bacteria are using quantum effects to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis.
As Jansen says, one such idea is that some scientists believe that these free electrons behave like the "Schrödinger's cat" from the famous thought experiment of 1936 and can be in two different states (and points in space) at the same time.
His team tested whether such plant "cats" actually exist by observing the interaction of chlorophyll molecules with light at room temperatures and at the boiling point of liquid nitrogen using a scanning electron microscope.
To get an answer to this question, the scientists went for a trick - they bombarded chlorophyll not with ordinary, but with polarized light. The fact is that the photosystems of bacteria contain not one, but seven molecules at once, two of which react to polarized light.
By bombarding them with polarized photons, Jansen and his colleagues tried to determine whether they would respond to them individually, or, if they were a shared quantum whole, would jointly generate free electrons.
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As these experiments showed, the particles of light really interacted with only one of the two molecules that perceive such light, but at the same time the energy of the photon was evenly "smeared" over both the other light "antenna". At the same time, characteristic oscillations arose inside them, which are well known to physicists involved in the "breeding" of Schrödinger's cats.
“We managed to see these quantum fluctuations, and show that they exist for exactly as long as the theory predicts. This proves that the photon energy is “superimposed” on two molecules at once. Further study of this phenomenon will help us improve the performance of solar cells and accelerate the creation of quantum computers,”concludes Jansen.