Entanglement between living bacteria and quantized light witnessed by Rabi splitting

C. Marletto, D. M. Coles, T. Farrow, V. Vedral

Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU and
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheeld, Sheeld S3 7RH, UK5
Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117543 and
Department of Physics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117542

We model recent experiments on living sulphur bacteria interacting with quantised light, using the Dicke
model. The strong coupling achieved between the bacteria and the light indicates that during the experiment
the bacteria (treated as dipoles) and the quantized light are entangled. The vacuum Rabi splitting, which was
measured in the experiment for a range of different parameters, can be used as an entanglement witness.
arXiv:1702.08075v1 [quant-ph] 26 Feb 2017

PACS numbers:

Witnessing quantum effects in living systems was long con- tion and take the coupling strength as uniform. Then, we
sidered an impossible task, even by the pioneers of quantum introduce the total angular momentum J of the atomic sam-
P i
σ± and J z =
P i
theory, such as Bohr [1]. Recent advances in theoretical and ple with components J± = σz and con-
experimental techniques are bringing us closer to accomplish- sider time-independent single-spin energy splittings ωb . The
ing it. Entanglement has extensively been investigated, and Hamiltonian of the system in the dipole approximation thus
even detected, in various many-body systems [2]. Since liv- reads (with ~ = 1 throughout)
ing systems are special cases of many-body systems, they can
be analysed with the same methods. In this paper we focus H0 = ωa a† a + ωb J z + g(a† + a)(J+ + J− ),
on experiments where living sulphur bacteria are entangled
with a quantised field of light [3]. This is particularly excit- where ωa is the frequency of the cavity and g is the vac-
ing, since the quantised nature of light was at the heart of the uum Rabi frequency (ignoring the vacuum contribution with-
complementarity that Bohr thought would ultimately make it out any loss of generality and assuming ~ = 1). The parameter
impossible for us to detect quantum effects in a living entity. j is the cooperation number in the Dicke theory [9], that is an
Green sulphur bacteria are found in anaerobic environments eigenvalue of J 2 which, together with the eigenstates of Jz , is
rich in sulphur compounds, such as microbial mats and around used to build the Dicke states. The ensemble of N two-level
hot springs [8]. While they are photosynthetic, they can sur- atoms is then described as a pseudo-spin of size j = N/2. We
vive in locations where light intensity drops to only a few hun- can now apply the Holstein-Primakoff transformation, defined
dred photons per second per bacteria[10]. The bacteria have as
evolved large antenna complexes called chlorosomes, which s s
are large aggregates of approximately 200,000 self-assembled
p b† b p † b† b
J+ = ~ 2 j 1 − b, J− = ~ 2 jb 1− ,
bacteriochlorophyll (BChl) molecules. Each bacterium con- 2j 2j
tains around 200 chlorosomes, where the dense packing of
the molecules and their high dipole moments result in high and
oscillator strengths that make the bacteria (and organic matter
Jz = ~( j − b† b) .
in general) good candidates for strong coupling. Their size,
approximately 2 µm × 500 nm, means that they can also be In the limit j >> 1 (thermodynamic limit) we obtain
inserted into a micron-sized optical microcavities with well-
√
defined photon mode energies. The strong coupling condition H0 ≈ ωa a† a + ωb b† b + Ng(a† + a)(b† + b),
is met when the leakage of the light trapped in the microcav-
ity is slow compared to the energy exchange rate between the The eigenstates of this Hamiltonian are typically entangled
light and bacteria. states between a number of excitations in one of the oscilla-
We resort to a quantum-mechanical model where the BChl tors (representing excitons in the bacteria) and the other har-
molecules situated in living bacteria are modeled as electric monic oscillator (representing photons in a single mode of
dipoles and reduced to two-level systems. Each of these light). Such “dressed” states between excitons and photons
dipoles is strongly coupled to the single frequency of light are known as polaritons. These quasi-particles have a mixed
in the cavity through the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. The physical character that is part-matter and part-light.
bacteria are modeled as a system of N two-level atoms, collec- The dense packing and high oscillator stengths in organic
tively interacting with the field of a single-mode cavity whose media make them well suited to giving rise rise to these quasi-
annihilation (creation) operator is a† (a). Each two-level atom particles via strong coupling with light. A special class of
is modeled as a pseudo-spin whose Pauli spin matrices are these particles, known as organic surface plasmon polaritons,
{σi± , σiz }(i=1,..,N) . We assume a realistic small-sized bacterial have been showcased in a series of recent experiments where
sample, neglect the variations of the cavity field at its loca- quantized light and organic matter were strongly coupled via
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cavities and organic semiconductors [11, 12], down to the However, it is worth pointing out that the same results (namely
level of manipulating single organic molecules at room tem- the observation of the vacuum Rabi splitting) can equally well
perature [13]. Besides the inherent interest that the hybrid be explained by a completely classical analysis. There is no
states of light and matter present, they are predicted to find contradiction with the entanglement witness in our model, be-
uses such as in controlling the chemical kinetics in a wide cause the witness already assumes that both systems are quan-
class of photochemical reactions [14]. tum and checks whether the subsystems are entangled. In the
To demonstrate entanglement we use entanglement wit- classical analysis, on the other hand, the cavity mode is rep-
nesses, which are physical observables that “react” differently resented by a simple harmonic oscillator and is coupled to N
to entangled and disentangled states. Here we will only focus classical dipoles each of which represents a BChl molecule
on ground-state entanglement since the relevant frequencies within the bacteria. The emission spectrum obtained via the
are at least one order of magnitude larger than kT at room multi-beam interference technique (assuming that the cavity
temperature at which the experiment was carried out. In our mode is on resonance with the dipole frequency) [5] exhibits
case of two effective coupled harmonic oscillators we can a splitting in the intensity peaks separated by the classical ana-
use the energy as a witness. For simplicity, we assume that logue of the vacuum Rabi splitting, given by:
ωa = ωb = ω, i.e. that the exciton frequency is on-resonance r
with the light in the cavity. The energy of separable states of Nω
Ω=d (1)
P
the form n,m pn,m |nmihnm| can never be smaller than ǫ0 Lc
where ǫ0 is the vacuum permittivity, Lc is the length of the
hH0 i sep ≥ 0
cavity, and d is the dipole moment. This classically obtained
In the real ground
√ state the energy is lower by the vacuum result is exactly the
√ same as that obtained by the full quantum
Rabi splitting Ng (we are ignoring the vacuum contribution analysis above ( Ng where g is the vacuum Rabi frequency)
without loss of generality). Hence the ground state is an en- and, interestingly, this also includes the square root scaling
tangled state. We can therefore conclude from the measure- with the number of oscillators (i.e. the molecules).
ments of Rabi splitting on two coupled harmonic oscillators One important subtlety should be mentioned here - relating
assumed for light and bacteria (treated as a large collection of to the indirect inference of entanglement in our system. If in-
dipoles), that they are entangled. Specifically, the entangled stead of the fully classical model, or indeed the fully quantum
subsystems are the excitons in the bacteria and the photons in model, we use a semi-classical model (where light is treated
the cavity. The amazing fact is that the bacteria can actually as a quantum system because we have direct experimental ev-
stay alive during the experiments, despite the fact that they idence of this fact), we can no longer obtain the vacuum Rabi
are strongly coupled to the cavity light. (The test of being splitting. This is a special case of a more general feature
alive in [3] was a form of homeostasis - the fact that the bac- where semi-classical models can never fully reproduce the
teria repelled a certain dye molecule during the experiment, quantum features. One could therefore argue that since light
which they absorb when dead). The entanglement witness is known to be quantum and the Rabi splitting is observed, the
above is also effectively a measure of entanglement. Namely, bacteria (more precisely, whatever degree of freedom within
the ground state is entangled so long as g > 0. The amount bacteria couples to light) also have to be quantum. The fact
of entanglement between bacteria and light could be quanti- that the semi-classical model fails to reproduce certain corre-
fied by the linear entropy of either of the subsystems. The lations between two subsystems is not unusual; in fact, it also
linear entropy is defined as the complement of the purity of features in cryptographic protocols, [6], where four bits can
the state, i.e., 1 − Tr{ρ2 } where ρ is the reduced density op- reproduce some correlations of a singlet, but one qubit and
erator of either of the subsystem (obtained by tracing out the two bits cannot.
degrees of freedom of the other subsystem). A simple calcula- There are however more refined and direct levels of probing
 √ 2 √ and confirming entanglement between two subsystems, here
tion shows that the linear entropy is ωNg , where Ng < ω.
√ being the two harmonic oscillators, one representing the bac-
In [3] the highest coupling achieved was Ng ≈ 0.2ω and teria and the other the cavity mode. At the most detailed level
therefore the amount of entanglement measured was 0.04. A we have Bell’s inequalities [4]. To detect a violation of the
question could be raised as to whether there might be other inequality, one would need to probe the bacteria and light sep-
processes that could affect this entanglement. For instance, arately, by measuring two suitably chosen conjugate observ-
the cavity could leak photons which could spoil the coherence ables for each. For instance, one could measure (effective)
of polaritons. However, we take it as an observational fact that x and p on both the dipoles in the bacteria and the cavity
polaritons last long enough to be detected and must therefore light. This is of course much harder to achieve experimen-
preserve coherence during this period. Excitons could also tally. Harder still would be to spatially separate the bacteria
dissipate within bacteria through interactions with phonons, and light to ensure that there is no signal propagation between
for instance, but these processes are typically on much longer the two while measurements are carried out (to ensure that the
timescales than the cavity photon lifetime. The witness of en- locality loophole is closed). Another possible line of probing
tanglement between light and bacteria outlined here has the the quantum character of the bacteria-light interaction is to
property of being one of the easiest to access experimentally. investigate the quantum coherent dynamics of polaritons. A
 3

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