The ability of migratory birds to orient relative to the Earth's magnetic field is believed to involve a coherent superposition of two spin states of a radical electron pair. However, the mechanism by which this coherence can be maintained in the face of strong interactions with the cellular environment has remained unclear. This paper addresses the problem of decoherence between two electron spins due to hyperfine interaction with a bath of spin-1/2 nuclei.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRescattering electrons offer great potential as probes of molecular properties on ultrafast timescales. The most famous example is molecular tomography, in which high harmonic spectra of oriented molecules are mapped to "tomographic images" of the relevant molecular orbitals. The accuracy of such reconstructions can be greatly affected by the distortion of scattering wave functions from their asymptotic forms due to interactions with the parent ion.
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