Abstract
Conductance measurements on short DNA wires were found to display various types of behavior that range from insulating to semi-conducting, and even to quasi-metallic, depending on the experimental set up, the environment and the nature of the DNA molecule. The variance of the results as well as the ab-initio calculations suggest that the environment and vibrational modes of DNA play an important role in the transport properties. In Chap. 11, Schmidt et al., report on their study of the electron transport through simple tight-binding models of short double-stranded DNA wires strongly coupled to the vibrational modes (vibrons) of the DNA. The vibrational modes can dissipate energy to the surrounding environment, represented by a bath. By applying equation-of-motion techniques they address the influence of specific DNA vibrational modes on the transport process, with parameters motivated by the ab-initio calculations. For homogeneous DNA sequences such as the polydeoxyguanosine-polydeoxycytidine (poly(dG)-poly(dC)) wires, the vibrons strongly enhance the linear conductance at low temperatures. Beyond the’ semiconducting’ gap the finite bias conductance is only qualitatively affected. The transport through such homogeneous DNA can be understood as quasi-ballistic transport through the extended states, which are modified by the coupling to the vibrational modes.KeywordsVibrational ModeHigh Occupied Molecular OrbitalRetarded Green FunctionBand Edge StateLower Band EdgeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Published Version
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