UCLA

The Posner molecule (calcium phosphate trimer, Ca₉(PO₄)₆) has been hypothesized to function as a biological quantum information processor due to its supposedly long-lived entangled ³¹P nuclear spin states. This hypothesis was challenged by our recent finding that the molecule lacks a well-defined rotational axis of symmetry─an essential assumption in the proposal for Posner-mediated neural processing─and exists as an asymmetric dynamical ensemble. Following up, we investigate here the spin dynamics of the molecule's entangled ³¹P nuclear spins within the asymmetric ensemble. Our simulations show that entanglement between two nuclear spins prepared in a Bell state in separate Posner molecules decays on a subsecond time scale─much faster than previously hypothesized, and not long enough for supercellular neuronal processing. Calcium phosphate dimers (Ca₆(PO₄)₄) however, are found to be surprisingly resilient to decoherence and are able to preserve entangled nuclear spins for hundreds of seconds, suggesting that neural processing might occur through them instead.