Compass-free migratory navigation
Xin Zhao, Hong-Bo Chen, Li-Hua Lu, You-Quan Li

TL;DR
This paper proposes a novel theoretical mechanism for migratory bird navigation based on sensing geomagnetic fields through spectral peaks in a four-level quantum system, offering a new perspective on biological magnetoreception.
Contribution
It introduces a new scenario for geomagnetic sensing in birds using spectral peak separation in a quantum system, differing from existing high-sensitivity or intelligence-based models.
Findings
The spectral peak separation encodes geomagnetic information.
The mechanism explains bird disorientation by oscillating magnetic fields.
It suggests a natural quantum sensing process in migratory navigation.
Abstract
How migratory birds can find the right way in navigating over thousand miles is an intriguing question, which much interested researchers in both fields of biology and physics for centuries. There several putative proposals that sound intuitively plausible all remain contested so far because those hypothesis-models of magnetoreceptor to sense geomagnetic field need either extremely high sensitivity or humankind-like intelligence to guide. Here we explore theoretically that the birds can navigate to their destination through an entirely new scenario to sense the geomagnetic field. Our proposal is based on separate peaks of the resonance-fluorescence spectrum of a four-level system derived from the ferric sulfide cluster which exists in a protein complex (Drosophila CG8198) of migratory birds. As the separation of spectral peaks contains information about geomagnetic field at both current…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEnergy Harvesting in Wireless Networks · Underwater Vehicles and Communication Systems · Antenna Design and Analysis
