Moving Breathers in Inhomogeneous
Lattices
SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND:
Breathers are localized oscillations in nonlinear, discrete systems as crystals, biomolecules and Josephson Junctions arrays. In 1994, the concept of breather was established on solid mathematical basis. Since then, mathematical methods of high precision have been developed to analyze their properties, specially, their mobility. Equally, it has been possible to detect their existence experimentally in some systems and further research is currently underway.
The objective of MOBIL is to clarify the complementary aspect brought about by the nonlinearity. Breathers restore mobility in inhomogeneous systems, which is impossible if they are linear. This striking property make them candidates to be a means of charge and energy transfer in biomolecules like DNA and other biopolymers. Understanding this phenomenon is important for the study of DNA functions as replication and transcription, and to the design of electronic nanodevices based in this molecule.