Spin-selective thermoelectric transport along a vibrating α-helical protein molecule

Abstract

Motivated by the development of bio-thermoelectricity and spin caloritronics, we studied the nonlinear spin-selective transport along a vibrating α-helical protein molecule in the presence of thermal bias by using the standard nonequilibrium Green’s function formalism. Our results demonstrate that the thermal bias induces the oscillation of spin-polarization between positive and negative values accompanied by spin current with increasing the chain length. Moreover, even for the very short preparable peptide chains, external electron-phonon interaction can give rise to the spin-selectivity, whereas characteristic electron-phonon interaction can not, but in conjunction with thermal bias, it has an important impact on the total current’s direction and the spin-polarized current intensity. Finally, the spin-polarization induced by thermal bias can be modulated by gate-bias much more easily as compared to that induced by electric bias. We conclude that by applying thermal bias and gate-bias, α-helical protein molecules are conducive to the storage of binary digits.