Utilizing quantum fingerprints in plant cells to evaluate plant productivity.

Abstract

Overcoming the strong chlorophyll background poses a significant challenge for measuring and optimizing plant growth. This research investigates the novel application of specialized quantum light emitters introduced into intact leaves of tobacco ( Nicotiana tabacum ), a well-characterized model plant system for studies of plant health and productivity. Leaves were harvested from plants cultivated under two distinct conditions: low light (LL), representing unhealthy leaves with reduced photosynthesis and high light (HL), representing healthy leaves with highly active photosynthesis. Higher-order correlation data were collected and analyzed using machine learning (ML) techniques, specifically a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to classify the photon emitter states. This CNN efficiently identified unique patterns and created distinct fingerprints for Nicotiana leaves grown under LL and HL, demonstrating significantly different quantum profiles between the two conditions. These quantum fingerprints serve as a foundation for a novel unified analysis of plant growth parameters associated with different photosynthetic states. By employing CNN, the emitter profiles were able to reproducibly classify the leaves as healthy or unhealthy. This model achieved high probability values for each classification, confirming its accuracy and reliability. The findings of this study pave the way for broader applications, including the application of advanced quantum and machine learning technologies in plant health monitoring systems.

Code and data availability

The article's Data availability statement explicitly deposits the paper's time-tagged photon correlation data (the raw measurements underlying the quantum fingerprinting and CNN analysis) in the Dryad Digital Repository, a public, paper-specific dataset.