Crucial effect of transverse vibrations on the transport through polymer chains

Abstract

The low temperature transport of electron, or vibrational or electronic exciton towards polymer chains turns out to be dramatically sensitive to its interaction with transverse acoustic vibrations. We show that this interaction leads to substantial polaron effect and decoherence, which are generally stronger than those associated with longitudinal vibrations. For site-dependent interactions transverse phonons form subohmic bath leading to the quantum phase transition accompanied by full suppression of the transport at zero temperature and fast decoherence characterized by temperature dependent rate of temperature to the power of two thirds at low temperature while this rate rate ois proportional to the squared temperature for site-independent interactions. The latter dependence was used to interpret recent measurements of temperature dependent vibrational energy transport in polyethylene glycol oligomers.

28 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Journal of Chemical Physics, references to literature have been updated and corrected

References in corpus (8)

• Numerical Renormalization Group for Bosonic Systems and Application to the Subohmic Spin-Boson Model
• Equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamics of the sub-ohmic spin-boson model
• A generalized multi-polaron expansion for the spin-boson model: Environmental entanglement and the biased two-state system
• Polaron dynamics with a multitude of Davydov D${}_2$ trial states
• The impact of exciton delocalization on exciton-vibration interactions in organic semiconductors
• Dissipation due to two-level systems in nano-mechanical devices
• Direct Experimental Determination of Spectral Densities of Molecular Complexes
• Optical absorption spectra and monomer interaction in polymers. Investigation of exciton coupling in DNA hairpins

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Maximum propagation speed and Cherenkov effect in optical phonon transport through periodic molecular chains
• Super diffusive length dependent thermal conductivity in one-dimensional materials with structural defects: longitudinal to transverse phonon scattering leads to $\kappa \propto L^{1/3}$ law