Boson Condensation in Biological Systems

Abstract

The accumulation of theoretical and experimental data about the components of a biological system is a fundamental step for understanding it. However a basic dynamical scheme is still lacking, actually a living system cannot be understood merely as the sum of the properties and behaviors of its components. This situation is very familiar in many body physics: a crystal, for example, is composed of atoms embedded in a lattice structure; but a complete description of the crystal can be obtained only if one considers other kinds of “particles”, e.g. phonons, plasmons, etc, besides the original atoms. These new particles, which are the quanta of the system’s collective excitations, appear rather peculiar. If one breaks up the crystal into its components, one does not find any trace of them — one will obtain only the “original” atoms. The crystal is basically the “collective behavior” of its component atoms. Studying the crystal means studying the dynamical collective modes which are in fact those “particles” as the phonons, the plasmons, etc. In the same way a physicist’s conclusion would be that a living system is characterized just by its dynamical collective modes. This is a formidable task because the basic dynamics might be very complicated. Such a task could be even out of the reach of any analytical computational scheme. Moreover a living system exhibits seemingly contradictory features.