Living things run on remarkably little energy. The whole body ticks over on about 100 watts, roughly a bright lightbulb. Mitochondria — the tiny structures inside every cell that make the energy currency called ATP — manage this with an efficiency no engine we build comes close to. Physics as usually taught doesn’t fully explain how. Some researchers suspect the answer involves quantum effects, but proving that inside a live cell has been the hard part.
What they saw
The team shone infrared light through living cells and fresh mouse tissue — kidney, liver, heart, muscle — and measured what frequencies got absorbed. One signal kept showing up at 71 terahertz. It appeared in every living sample, and in mitochondria taken out of them. Dry the same tissue out and grind it up, and the signal was simply gone.
That’s the interesting bit. No known molecule absorbs at that frequency. And it only appears when the structure is alive and intact.
What they think it means
Their explanation is that a mitochondrion works a bit like the body of a violin. It happens to be almost exactly the right length for a particular wavelength of infrared light to bounce back and forth inside it and resonate. The fatty membranes packed inside are dense with chemical bonds that vibrate at that same frequency. Light and vibration lock together into something that’s neither purely one nor the other, and that new hybrid shows up as the 71 THz signal. Destroy the internal structure and there’s no violin body left, so no note.
A finding
They then shone a very faint infrared light — genuinely faint, hundreds of times weaker than is used in comparable lab techniques — at living cells for ten minutes. ATP production rose about 10%. A different frequency, at the same power, did nothing at all.
So the effect isn’t just heat, and it isn’t nothing.
Where that leaves it
The authors argue mitochondria hold a quantum state that can be nudged from outside, and that this might be part of how life stays so energy-efficient.
Note: This is a preprint, so it hasn’t been through peer review yet. The signal is a small shoulder on a much bigger peak from carbon dioxide, teased out by fitting curves to the data, and the live and dead samples weren’t measured the same way — so the disappearing signal has more than one possible explanation. The quantum story is a model that fits the observations rather than something they measured directly. And a 10% change across eight samples is suggestive, not settled.
But it is an intriguing line of inquiry nevertheless. And perhaps another aspect of humanity that won’t readily be mimicked let alone surpassed by AI methinks
Source: A downloadable PDF version of the article is available on Google Scholar here: Yang, Y., Gu, Z. and Song, B., 2026. A quantum state of mitochondria in the living cell. bioRxiv , pp.2026-09.