I am trying to understand the nature of Bose-Einstein Condensates and the possibility that they may be associated with living processes. My intuition tells me that they must be scale -free processes. Can anyone confirm this intuition with some references?
Your intuition is imprecise, if not incorrect. BEC corresponds to the macroscopic occupation of a singe-particle quantum state (in the case of full condensation, the entire system is in one single-particle quantum state), and that cannot be the case for living processes. Having said that, there are some (scientists like Roger Penrose) who believe that quantum coherence plays a role in the thinking process, that the faculty of, say, humans to think on a very basic level is founded on the quantum states that can remain coherent over a considerably long period of time (of the order of 1 second) even at room temperature. But this is different from BEC.
Thanks Behnam, your answer is appreciated.
Leaving the question of whether BEC's play a role in biological processes aside, is my intuition that BEC's may be more easily 'created' if some sort of fractal scaffold was employed correct?
You are welcome Christopher. Regarding your specific question, I do not know the answer. It may or may not be that your question is related to, or inspired by, the observations in the high-Tc compound La2CuO4+d, as reported for instance here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7308/full/nature09260.html
and here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/39/15685
If so, the claim is not that superconductivity in this compound is caused by the fractal distribution of the dopants, but that the value of Tc shows a positive correlation with this fractal distribution. This is an important distinction to make, since you explicitly refer to 'created'.
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