Recent developments in the physics of your sense of smell

A radical proposal in 1996 [L. Turin, Chem. Senses 21, 773 (1996)] was that human olfactory receptors use phonon assisted electron tunnelling to probe the vibrational spectrum of odorants in order to determine their chemical identity. A development of this model [J. C. Brookes et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 98, 038101 (2007)] showed that this Turin mechanism is indeed physically possible, even robust, but left a number of questions open. One such question is: between which sites does the tunnelling electron pass? Our recent calculations support a particular pair of likely sites. Because of the complexity of biological environments, probing the receptor is difficult. Thus we have begun to investigate the properties of a semiconductor nanowire device that mimics the key processes [A. P. Horsfield et al., J. Appl. Phys., 108, 014511 (2010)]. We will present the latest findings of this study.