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1 Introduction 2 Preliminary Remarks on the Biological Situation 3 Evidence of the Coherence of Biophotons 4 Biological Implications 5 Conclusions

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1 Introduction

Biophotons are photons emitted spontaneously by all living systems.^1-3 In particular, this phenomenon is not confined to "thermal" radiation in the infrared range. It is well known at present that biophotons are emitted also in the range from visible up to UV. Actually, the intensity of "biophotons" can be registered from a few photons per second and square centimeter surface area on up to some hundred photons from every living system under investigation. The spectral distribution never does display small peaks around definite frequencies. Rather, the quite flat distribution within the range of at least 300 to 800 nm has to be assigned to a thermodynamical system "far away" from equilibrium, since the probability f(n)(see Footnote) of occupying the phase space is on average almost constant and exceeds the Boltzmann distribution in this spectral range by at least a factor of 10¹⁰(in the red) up to 10⁴⁰ (in the UV-range). Fig. 1 displays a typical frequency distribution of a living system, where the spectral intensity of biophotons (at the outside of the living system) has been averaged over several measurements and then expressed in terms of the excitation temperatures (upper figures and lower, left figure) or the occupation probability f(n ) (lower right figure). The term "bio-" in biophotons has been introduced⁴ in the same way as it has been done in the term "bio-luminescence", pointing to the biological source of the emission, and the term "photons" in the word ,,biophotons" has been chosen to express the fact that the phenomenon is characterized by measuring single photons, indicating that this phenomenon has to be considered as a subject of quantum optics rather than of "classical" physics.

Figure 1:

Excitation temperature q (n )=hn /k ln(2n ²F/c²nn ) of cucumber seedlings under different treatments and the ln(f(n ))-value compared to the Boltzman ln(f(n )).

Given this background we understand that two completely opposite interpretations of this phenomenon come up, i.e. the biochemical theory (BCT) and the coherence theory (CT). It is amazing that both the BCT and the opposite "biophysical theory" CT take the rather low intensity as an essential point in their arguments. According to the BCT,^5-6 biophoton emission is some kind of "waste" of the metabolic events taking place permanently within the cells. The BCT indicates some imperfections in chemical reactions which by returning to thermal equilibrium emit overshoot energy of chemically induced optical transitions, mainly linked to radical reactivity of oxidation processes.

The CT, on the other hand, points to the low intensity as an indication of nonclassical light which may display even sub-Poissonian photocount statistics and may provide thus an optimized optical communication channel in biological systems within living matter of "optimized" high optical density².

It is impossible to decide after measurements of the spectral intensities whether the BCT or the CT reflect the truth since ordinary physical properties of biophotons may not distinguish one or other theoretical approach. A similar situation would occur if somebody constructed a squeezed light source of a many-mode photon field. No one could answer the question of coherence as long as only the spectral distribution of the light emission is known.

The unsolved problem of biophoton emission forces us to look for experimental evidence of either the coherent or the chaotic nature of the biophoton field. If is possible to show evidence of an extraordinary high degree of coherence of biophotons then the conclusion follows that this universal phenomenon of biological systems is responsible for the information transfer within and between cells, answering then the crucial question of intra- and extracellular biocommunication, including the regulation of the metabolic activities of cells as well as of growth and differentiation and even of evolutionary development.

In order to reveal the importance of the experimental research and the significance of the results which have been obtained up to now, let us briefly characterize some essential activities of a cell concerning the necessity of optical transitions, and then confine ourselves to the main experimental results on the physical problem of coherence, then going back again to some basic biological phenomena, where the non-linear coupling of biophotons and living matter becomes evident. We will then show that an understanding in terms of the coherence of biophotons is consistent with all the observations, while the BCT does not allow us to explain all the physical and biological effects under study. We are even convinced that experimental evidence of the coherence of biophotons can be drawn from the experimental results.

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