Photosynthesis is incoherent
Beginning in 2007 luxury journals published some experimental papers making claims that quantum coherence was essential to photosynthesis. This was followed by a lot of theoretical papers claiming support. I was skeptical about these claims and in the first few years of this blog wrote several posts highlighting problems with the experiments, theory, interpretation, and hype. Here is a recent paper that repeats one of the first experiments. Nature does not rely on long-lived electronic quantum coherence for photosynthetic energy transfer Hong-Guang Duan, Valentyn I. Prokhorenko, Richard Cogdell, Khuram Ashraf, Amy L. Stevens, Michael Thorwart, R. J. Dwayne Miller During the first steps of photosynthesis, the energy of impinging solar photons is transformed into electronic excitation energy of the light-harvesting biomolecular complexes. The subsequent energy transfer to the reaction center is understood in terms of exciton quasiparticles which move on a grid of biomolecular sit