Entanglement in quantum many-body systems far away from equilibrium: Are there non-trivial quantum effects in biology? - Hans Briegel

We show that quantum mechanical entanglement can prevail in noisy open quantum many-body systems at high temperatures and far away from thermodynamic equilibrium, despite the deteriorating effect of de-coherence. In the first part of this talk, I will review some of our work on entanglement and de-coherence in so-called spin gases, and the possibility of stabilizing entanglement without sophisticated means of coding and error correction. From a broader perspective, these investigations provide a new perspective on the question whether non-trivial quantum effects such as entanglement may play a role in biology, which will constitute the second part of my talk.