Directed polaron propagation in linear polypeptides induced by intramolecular vibrations and external electric pulses

Abstract

We study the propagation of $\alpha$-helix polarons in a model describing the non-adiabatic interaction between an electron and a lattice of quantum mechanical oscillators at physiological temperature. We show that when excited by a sub-picosecond electric pulse, as induced by experimentally observed sub-picosecond charge separation, the polaron is displaced by up to hundreds of lattice sites before the electron becomes delocalised. We discuss biophysical implications of our results.

16 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Electron motion in a Holstein molecular chain in an electric field
• Hirota method for the nonlinear Schrődinger equation with an arbitrary linear time-dependent potential

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Exact analytical solution of a novel modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation: solitary quantum waves on a lattice