Mitochondrial Ultraweak Photon Emission as a Hawking-Analogue Information Channel: Second-Order Photon Statistics, Cross-Population NIRS Correlation, and the Decisive Discriminating Experiment

Mitochondrial ultraweak photon emission (UPE) is canonically attributed to stochastic reactive oxygen species chemistry and excited carbonyl relaxation. The companion paper (Meyler, 2026a) established a formal information-theoretic framework—mutual information bounds, the data processing inequality, a seven-condition blocking protocol, and a photon-substitution arm—that converts the signaling hypothesis into a set of falsifiable inequalities. The present paper contributes three advances beyond that framework. First, we identify a precise structural analogy between mitochondrial UPE and Hawking radiation, operating at the level of information theory rather than physics: both systems generate fields whose local reduced statistics are thermal, yet whose global state can carry non-zero mutual information accessible only through higher-order photon correlations. Second, we identify the normalized second-order photon correlation function g²(τ)—the observable that distinguishes thermal, coherent, and sub-Poissonian fields—as the specific statistic that encodes this mutual information in the UPE case, and show that it is the correct discriminating observable by exactly analogous reasoning to the Page (1993) result for Hawking radiation. Third, we introduce cross-population near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) of cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) redox state as a new experimental readout: faster and more directly mechanistic than oxygen consumption rate (OCR) alone, it supplies a second independent time series for estimating I(X;Y) from the relevant variables. Together these contributions specify the minimal decisive experiment that resolves whether UPE constitutes a photonic information channel—and explain why no amount of improved optical shielding can substitute for it.