Influence of vibrational modes on the electronic properties of DNA

TL;DR

This study explores how vibrational modes in DNA influence electron transport, revealing that sequence homogeneity and temperature significantly affect conductance and localization, with implications for molecular electronics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of vibrational effects on DNA electron transport using ab-initio derived parameters and equation-of-motion techniques, highlighting sequence-dependent behaviors.

Findings

Homogeneous DNA exhibits quasi-ballistic transport with enhanced low-temperature conductance.

Inhomogeneous DNA shows strong localization and sequence-dependent conductance effects.

Electron-vibron coupling modifies the density of states and transport properties in DNA.

Abstract

We investigate the electron (hole) transport through short double-stranded DNA wires in which the electrons are strongly coupled to the specific vibrational modes (vibrons) of the DNA. We analyze the problem starting from a tight-binding model of DNA, with parameters derived from ab-initio calculations, and describe the dissipative transport by equation-of-motion techniques. For homogeneous DNA sequences like Poly- (Guanine-Cytosine) we find the transport to be quasi-ballistic with an effective density of states which is modified by the electron-vibron coupling. At low temperatures the linear conductance is strongly enhanced, but above the `semiconducting' gap it is affected much less. In contrast, for inhomogeneous (`natural') sequences almost all states are strongly localized, and transport is dominated by dissipative processes. In this case, a non-local electron-vibron coupling influences the conductance in a qualitative and sequence-dependent way.