Many species of birds undergo migration using the earth's magnetic field to nagivate. Magnetic fields, especially ones as weak as the earth's, usually have little effect in the "warm, wet, and noisy" environments of biology, but a quantum process known as the radical pair mechanism explains many aspects of this effect. However, the sensitivity of the radical pair mechanism model is below what is observed in migrating birds. In this research, we attempted to create more detailed models of the radical pair mechanism in order to enhance its sensitivity.
Here, the radical pair mechanism is computationally modelled and compared with existing analytical models. The sensitivity of our computational model of the radical pair mechanism is enhanced by the addition of motion between the involved radicals. The potential of radical motion as a mechanism to explain the extremely high sensitivity avian magnetoreception is explored with computational optimization.
PDF of full paper here
Further research has been done by my project supervisor, Daniel Kattnig, and can be read here