Workshop on: QUANTUM INFORMATION AND FOUNDATIONS OF QUANTUM MECHANICS

Quantum Mechanics: Axiomatics and connections with Computing and Information Theory

The quantum Goldilocks effect: Convergence of timescales in complex quantum biomolecules

aula 102 - 8 luglio ore 11.00
  Seth Lloyd, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

>PRESENTATION:Lloyd was born on August 2, 1960. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1978 and received a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard College in 1982. He earned a certificate of advanced study in mathematics and a master of philosophy degree from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984, while on a Marshall Scholarship. Lloyd was awarded a doctorate by Rockefeller University in 1988 (advisor Heinz Pagels) after submitting a thesis on Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How Complex Systems Get Information, and What They Do With It. From 1988 to 1991, Lloyd was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Since 1988, Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communication, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.

Seth Lloyd
Abstract  
  Excitonic transport in photosynthesis exhibits a wide range of time scales. Absorption and initial relaxation takes place over tens of femtoseconds. Excitonic lifetimes are on the order of a nanosecond. The remaining time scales, including hopping rates, energy differences between chromophores, reorganization energies, and decoherence rates all converge to the picosecond scale. In this talk I show that the convergence of timescales in photosynthesis can be understood as an example of the `quantum Goldilocks effect': natural selection tends to drive quantum systems to the degree of complexity that is `just right' for attaining maximum efficiency.
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