Causal structure of the Frohlich model of cellular electromagnetic activity

The cellular membrane as well as some intracellular structures contain pola r macromolecular units, which, especially when receiving energy from such s ources as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) decomposition, can perform sustained vibrational motions and hence produce an electromagnetic field. Individual molecular oscillators within groups containing various numbers of them int eract with each other and exchange energy with the surroundings. The phenom enon was modeled by H. Frohlich using a system of coupled nonlinear rate eq uations for the occupancy numbers of the collective modes of oscillations. This article employs a special diagrammatic technique to represent causal r elationships implicit in these equations for the case of two and three indi vidual modes. In this way, better understanding of some known properties (s uch as energy condensation in the lowest order mode) is achieved, and some new features of the model are uncovered, in particular, the presence and at tributes of the feedback loops in the representative diagrams.