Davydov coupling, hydrogen bonds

There is also the possibility of Davydov coupling, which is likely to appear when there are double or multiple H-bond systems [7,21-23]. It is responsible for cooperative effects between neighboring hydrogen bonds in cyclic hydrogen bonded dimers, or more generally in hydrogen-bonded chains in solids [ 10,24—34]. 

Proteins, however, must function at biological temperatures, and to be useful, the Davydov soliton must survive at these temperatures. The first difficulty faced by the Davydov/Scott model was the question of the thermal stability of the Davydov soliton. The Davydov/Scott Hamiltonian includes two systems one, the amide I vibration, is treated as a quantum mechanical entity and the second, the vibrations of the peptide groups as a whole (or the changes in the hydrogen bond lengths) are very often treated classically, an approximation that shall be designated here as the mixed quantum-classical approximation. The first simulations of the Davydov/Scott model at finite temperature were performed within the mixed quantum/classical model and coupled the classical part of the system to a classical bath. The result was that the localized excitation dispersed in a few picoseconds at biological temperatures. However, this result clashed with another obtained in Monte... 

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