Related papers: What is the meaning of lifetime measurement?
Measurement in biological systems became a subject of concern as a consequence of numerous reports on limited reproducibility of experimental results. To reveal origins of this inconsistency, we have examined general features of biological…
We revisit the neutron lifetime puzzle, a discrepancy between beam and bottle measurements of the weak neutron decay. Since both types of measurements are realized at different times after the nuclear production of free neutrons, we argue…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…
A novel method for picosecond lifetime measurements of excited gamma-ray emitting nuclear states has been developed for fast beams from fragmentation reactions. A test measurement was carried out with a beam of 124Xe at an energy of ~55…
In this review lifetime measurements of ions with at most two electrons are summarized. Such highly ionized systems have been studied - until now - only in the Experimental Storage Ring of the GSI in Darmstadt. Emphasis is put on decays via…
The evolution of observable quantities of finite quantum systems is analyzed when the latter are subject to nondestructive measurements. The type and number of measurements characterize the level of decoherence produced in the system. A…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
The spontaneous decay of an excited atom by photon emission is one of the most common and elementary physical process present in nature and in laboratories. The decay is random in time with constant probability density, as it can be…
Across diverse biological systems -- ranging from neural networks to intracellular signaling and genetic regulatory networks -- the information about changes in the environment is frequently encoded in the full temporal dynamics of the…
Radioactivity is understood to be described by a Poisson process, yet some measurements of nuclear decays appear to exhibit unexpected variations. Generally, the isotopes reporting these variations have long half lives, which are plagued by…
Knowledge of the decay rates (or half-lives) of radioisotopes is critical in many fields, including medicine, archeology, and nuclear physics, to name just a few. Central to the many uses of radioisotopes is the belief that decay rates are…
Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we…
Measurements take a singular role in quantum theory. While they are often idealized as an instantaneous process, this is in conflict with all other physical processes in nature. In this Letter, we adopt a standpoint where the interaction…
In recent years it is increasingly being recognized that biochemical signals are not necessarily constant in time and that the temporal dynamics of a signal can be the information carrier. Moreover, it is now well established that…
Appealing to several multivariate information measures---some familiar, some new here---we analyze the information embedded in discrete-valued stochastic time series. We dissect the uncertainty of a single observation to demonstrate how the…
We study the dynamics of an atomic two-level system decaying by spontaneous emission of light. Subject to continuous detection of the radiated field, the system tends with certainty to the ground state in the long time limit, but at initial…
Information of relevance to the organism often is represented by the concentrations of particular molecules inside a cell. As outside observers we can now measure these concentrations precisely, but the cell's own mechanisms must be…
Circadian clocks are the central timekeepers of life, allowing cells to anticipate changes between day and night. Experiments in recent years have revealed that circadian clocks can be highly stable, raising the question how reliably they…
After reviewing the description of an unstable state in the framework of nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics (QM) and relativistic Quantum Field Theory (QFT), we consider the effect of pulsed, ideal measurements repeated at equal time…
Molecular excited vibrational states are metastable states and we incorporate their finite lifetimes into the theory of vibrational energy transfer between weakly interacting molecules, i.e., at internuclear distances at which they do not…