Your Nose Could Use Quantum Tunneling to Distinguish Between Similar Molecules
Drosophila melanogaster It doesn't just smell. It quantum tunnels. Mr.checker via Wikimedia The olfactory sense has long been thought to stem from the way a battery of chemical receptors in the nose interact with molecules based on their physical shapes. But a collaboration between MIT researchers and their Greek colleagues is nosing out a far more complex and potentially useful mechanism that enables sense of smell: quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling is the same mechanism that allows flash memory to store charge and scanning tunneling microscopes to form images. Simply put, tunneling is a well-defined process that lets a particle "tunnel" through a barrier even when its kinetic energy is less than the potential energy of the barrier. In the case of electrons, that means moving through non-conductive areas that, classically speaking, they shouldn't be able to. As it pertains to smell, the idea is that receptors in the nose can distinguish between two...