Room-temperature superradiance from quantum optical networks in protein fibers

Networks of tryptophan – an aromatic amino acid with strong fluorescent response – are ubiquitous in biological systems, particularly protein fibers. We analyzed the cooperative effects induced by ultraviolet (UV) excitation of several biologically relevant tryptophan mega-networks. Our theoretical analysis in the single-excitation manifold predicted the formation of strongly superradiant states due to collective interactions among up to more than 100,000 tryptophan UV-excited transition dipoles in microtubule architectures, which leads to an enhancement of the fluorescence quantum yield that is confirmed by steady-state experiments [1]. Femtosecond UV transient absorption results indicated superradiant state lifetimes of no more than a few picoseconds, consistent with theory. Contrary to conventional assumptions that quantum effects cannot survive in large biosystems at high temperatures, our numerical simulations [2] and analytical results for helical emitter distributions [3] suggest that macropolymer lattices of tryptophan in actin filaments and amyloid fibrils exhibit observable and robust effects with increasing length, due to quantum coherent interactions in the single-photon limit. Superradiant enhancement and high quantum yield in neuroprotein polymers would thus play a crucial role in information processing in the brain, and in neuroprotection during the onset of Alzheimer's and related dementias. Our results motivated a revisiting of the computing limits of cytoskeletal and neuronal architectures [4], which are generally considered to signal via Hodgkin-Huxley action potentials rather than via superradiant states in such tryptophan lattices. The robustness of superradiant states paired with subradiant states in these protein architectures thus offers a novel paradigm for understanding the role of large collectives of quantum emitters in warm, wet, and wiggly environments, and it may illuminate the vast computational capacities of both neural and aneural organisms alike [5,6].

References Cited:

[1] Journal of Physical Chemistry B 128, 4035–4046 (2024). [2] Frontiers in Physics 12, 1387271 (2024). [3] arXiv:2510.22468 [quant-ph] (2025). [4] Science Advances 11, eadt4623 (2025).[5] arXiv:2504.03492 [physics.bio-ph] (2025). [6] arXiv:2510.19976 [quant-ph] (2025).

 

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