G BASKARAN

Institute of Mathematical Sciences,  C.I.T. Campus, Chennai 600 113, India

Abstract.

A few billion years of evolutionary time and the complex process of 'selection' has given biology an opportunity to explore a variety of condensed matter phenomena and situations, some of which have been discovered by humans in the laboratory, that too only in extreme non-biological conditions such as low temperatures, high purity, high pressure etc., in the last centuries. Biology, at some level, is a complex and self-regulated condensed matter system compared to the 'inanimate' condensed matter systems such as liquid ⁴ He, liquid water or a piece of graphite. In this article I propose a hypothesis that `all basic condensed matter physics phenomena and notions (already known and ones yet to be discovered) mirror in biology'. I explain this hypothesis by considering the idea of 'Bose condensation' or 'momentum space order' and discuss two known example of quantum magnetism encountered in biology. I also provide some new and rather speculative possibility, from light harvesting in biological   photosynthesis, of mesoscopic exciton condensation related phenomena at room temperature.

Keywords:  Condensed matter physics; magnetic crystals in biology; excitons and photosynthesis.

Pacs Nos.  87.10.+e; 78.20.-e; 75.10.-b