Spin transport in helical biological systems

Abstract

Motivated by the recent experimental demonstration of spin selective effects in monolayers of double-stranded DNA oligomers, our work presents a minimal model to describe electron transmission through helical fields. Our model highlight that the lack of inversion symmetry due to the chirality of the potential is a key factor which will lead to a high spin-polarization (SP). We also study the stability of the SP against fluctuations of the electronic structure induced by static disorder affecting the on-site energies. In the energy regions where the spin- filtering occurs, our results remain stable against moderate disorders although the SP is slightly reduced.