Fundamental Physical Science

Proposals to the Biological Control program (DARPA-BAA-16-17) are due April 29, 2016. The program seeks to build the foundations for multiscale control of biological systems.

Researchers working on DARPA’s Quantum Effects in Biological Environments (QuBE) program have shown that the electromagnetic noise that permeates modern urban environments can disrupt a bird’s internal magnetic compass. The findings settle a decades-long debate into whether low-level, artificial electric and magnetic fields can affect biological processes in higher vertebrates. For DARPA, the results hint at a new class of bio-inspired sensors at the intersection of biology and quantum physics.

Biological sensors often display high sensitivity, selectivity, and low false alarm rates while being fabricated and operated in dirty, noisy natural environments. Attempts to emulate these sensors synthetically have not fully met expectations. Recent evidence suggests that some biological sensors exploit nontrivial quantum mechanical effects to produce macroscopic output signals. Examples of such sensors include the highly efficient energy transfer properties of photosynthesis in plants, bacteria, and algae; magnetic field sensing used by some birds for navigation; and the ability of some animals to detect odors at the single molecule level.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is requesting information on the state-of-the-art in experimentally observing, modeling and understanding communication between biosystems exploiting electromagnetic (EM) waves from low frequencies (kHz) to high frequencies (THz).