RSC 2016 Interdisciplinary Prize Lecture: Animal navigation using magnetically sensitive chemistry

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• Prof. Peter Hore, Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford
• Tuesday 14 March 2017, 14:00-15:00
• Chem Eng 124.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Dwaipayan Chakrabarti.

RSC 2016 Interdisciplinary Prize Lecture and School seminar hosted by Dr Melanie M. Britton

Most physical scientists would probably treat with scepticism the suggestion that a chemical reaction could respond to a magnetic field as weak as that of the Earth. After all, the interaction of a molecule with a 50 T magnetic field is more than a million times smaller than kBT at room temperature. Nevertheless, the kinetics of certain chemical reactions are magnetically sensitive. The key molecular species are pairs of transient free radicals whose electron-nuclear spin systems evolve coherently under the influence of internal and external magnetic interactions.

In this seminar, I will discuss the proposal that the coherent quantum spin-dynamics of photo-induced radical pairs in cryptochromes (photo-active proteins) could be the mechanism of the light-dependent magnetic compass sense of migratory birds.

This talk is part of the School of Chemistry Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Chem Eng 124
• School of Chemistry Seminars

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