Effect of temperature on polaron dynamics in poly-DNA

Abstract

We investigate the effect of temperature on polaron dynamics in the framework of a tight-binding model. The dissociation of a polaron will become fast with the increase of temperature. There exists a crossover of the charge localization time from strong to weak temperature-dependence. Instead of the uniform motion at zero temperature, a polaron moves un-uniformly under a driven field at a finite temperature, which indicates a discrete hopping between base pairs. It is also found that the polaron motion is thermally activated. A high temperature will result in a fast movement of a polaron under a deriving field.