DECOHERENCE at the MOLECULAR SCALE - Philip Stamp

In what ways can decoherence be important for processes taking place at the molecular level? The answer to this question depends on the processes involved and on their timescale. We now know that the spin dynamics of both large and small molecules is crucially affected by decoherence from the nuclear spin bath. It is interesting to ask how the charge dynamics of biological molecules, from DNA to proteins, might be affected by decoherence processes, and what the mechanism of these might be. It is also important to ask to what use we might put insights gained in recent years from quantum information theory and condensed matter physics, about how to control this decoherence. I will argue that quantum walk theory, supplemented by a revised theory of error correction, will be very useful here. This talk will be a mixture of hard results and speculation.