Structural and dynamical disorder and charge transport in DNA

DNA can be viewed as a one-dimensional chain composed of stacked base pairs, and the randomness of the pair sequence has important impact on charge transport. In this paper, we study a realistic DNA model, in which the on-site energies for the different bases are correlated to the hopping integrals between the different pairs. This correlation is a natural consequence of the microscopic structure, and we find it drastically enhances the transmission probability, even if the base pairs are distributed randomly. On the other hand, we show also that torsional motion along the DNA chain produces strong polaron effects that suppress the electronic motion. Comparison with experiments require then a full description of polarons in structural correlated systems.

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