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

Long-distance electron transfer (ET) plays an important part in many biological processes. Also, fundamental understanding of ET processes could give grounds for designing miniaturized electronic devices. So far, experimental data on the ET mostly concern ET rates which characterize ET processes as a whole. Here, we develop a different approach which could provide more information about intrinsic characteristics of the long-range intramolecular ET. A starting point of the studies is an obvious resemblance between ET processes and electric transport through molecular wires placed between metallic contacts. Accordingly, the theory of electronic transport through molecular wires is applied to analyze characteristics of a long-range electron transfer through molecular bridges. Assuming a coherent electron tunneling to be a predominant mechanism of ET at low temperatures, it is shown that low-temperature current-voltage characteristics could exhibit a special structure, and the latter contains information concerning intrinsic features of the intramolecular ET. Using the Buttiker dephasing model within the scattering matrix formalism, we analyze the effect of dephasing on the electron transmission function and current-voltage curves.