Electronic Specific Heat of DNA: Effects of backbones and disorder

TL;DR

This study investigates the electronic specific heat of DNA molecules with various sequences and backbone structures, revealing universal responses to disorder and contrasting effects at different temperature regimes.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how backbone structure and environmental disorder influence the electronic specific heat of DNA within a tight-binding model.

Findings

Universal ESH response across different DNA sequences

Opposite effects of backbone disorder at low and high temperatures

Analysis of density of states supports ESH results

Abstract

In this present work we report the results of our investigation on the electronic specific heat (ESH) of DNA molecule modelled within the tight-binding framework. We take four different DNA sequences ranging from periodic, quasi-periodic to random and studied both ESH and also the density of states to supplement our ESH results. The role of the backbone structure and the effectsof environment on ESH are discussed. We observe that irrespective of the sequences there is auniversal response of the ESH spectra for a given disorder. The nature of response of specific heaton backbone disorder is totally opposite in low and high temperature regimes.