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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Biomolecular devices harness the structural diversity of living systems to deliver functionalities that are often inaccessible in conventional nanomachines. The theoretical description of these devices becomes highly nuanced at the single–molecule level, where granular characteristics, high– dimensional energy landscapes, and a lack of symmetries collude to make atomistic simulations imperative. While generally successful, this approach is insufficient in a strongly nonequilibrium regime — particularly for heat transport — where conventional sampling and dimensional reduction techniques fail to capture essential aspects of energy landscape architecture. In this talk, we introduce a controlled approach to simplify these landscapes, circumventing the aforementioned difficulties while faithfully reflecting the dynamics of energy propagation. Furthermore, we use a model protein to demonstrate that heat transport in biomolecules is highly sensitive to topological characteristics of the conformational ensemble. These properties define a crossover between energy localization and free transport, suggesting general design principles for biomimetic and soft–matter based nanosystems.
Host: Kirill Velizhanin