Bloch oscillations of a soliton in a molecular chain

This paper presents the results of numerical experiments simulating Bloch oscillations of solitons in a deformable molecular chain subject to a constant electric field. By using as an example a homogeneous polynucleotide chain, it is shown that the system under consideration can exhibit complicated dynamical behaviour: when subject to field intensities less than a certain critical value, a soliton exhibits oscillations as a whole, while at field intensities exceeding this threshold, the soliton becomes a breather that oscillates. It is shown that the motion of a charge in a deformable chain is infinite, which in contrast to that in a rigid chain. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2007