Quantum Hearing, Hey!

Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 725 - 728 (1985)

Quantum Noise and the Threshold of Hearing

Abstract

References

Citing Articles (2)

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William Bialek ^*,†
Department of Biophysics and Medical Physics, and Biology and Medicine Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106

Allan Schweitzer
Coleman Memorial Laboratory, University of California, San Francisco, California 94133

See Also: Erratum

Received 16 March 1984

We argue that the sensitivity of the ear reaches a limit imposed by the uncertainty principle. This is possible only if the receptor cell holds the detector elements in a special nonequilibrium state which has the same noise characteristics as a ground (T=0 K) state. To accomplish this "active cooling" the molecular dynamics of the system must maintain quantum mechanical coherence over the time scale of the measurement.

@1985 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.54.725
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.54.725
PACS: 87.10.+e, 03.65.Bz, 43.60.+d, 43.63.+n

^* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
^† Present address.

See Also

Erratum: William Bialek and Allan Schweitzer, Erratum: Quantum noise and the threshold of hearing [Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 725 (1985)], Phys. Rev. Lett. 56, 996 (1986)