Title: Energy funnelling and bubble and bend generation in biomolecules

Speaker: Peter L. Christiansen
with PV Larsen, O Bang, JFR Archilla and Yu B Gaididei

Abstract: A plane bent chain of Morse oscillators with long range dispersive interaction is first considered. Moving localized oscillations may be trapped in the bending region. Thus the chain geometry acts like an impurity. Energy funelling is observed in the case of random initial conditions modelling temperature. Secondly, an augmented model of the DNA molecule including longrange interactions between twisted base pair dipoles is presented. A mechanism for bubble generation is found for suffciently strong values of the dipole interaction coeficient. The relationship between bubble generation, curvature and twist is investigated. An analytical approach supports the numerical results. Nonlinearity induced bend generation in semiflexible molecules is observed. It is shown that bend generation has properties of a phase transition of first order.