Low-temperature electronic transport through macromolecules and characteristics of intramolecular electron transfer

A theory of electronic transport through molecular wires is applied toanalyze characteristics of a long-range electron transfer (ET) throughmolecular bridges in macromolecules with complex donor/acceptor subsystems.Assuming a coherent electron tunneling through the bridge to be the predominantmechanism of ET at low temperatures it is shown that low temperaturecurrent-voltage curves can exhibit a step-like structure, which containsinformation concerning intrinsic features of ET processes such as the effect ofdonor/acceptor coupling to the bridge and primary pathways of electronstunneling through the bridge. By contacting the proposed theoretical analysiswith such experimental data a variety of valuable characteristics of long-rangeintramolecular ET can be identified. Analytical and numerical results arepresented. Using the Buttiker dephasing model within the scattering matrixformalism we analyze dephasing effects, and we show that these effects could bereduced enough to allow the structure of the electron transmission function tobe exposed in the experiments on the electronic transport throughmacromolecules.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, text revise