Study of Electrical and Thermoelectrical Properties of One Strand DNA Chain for Nanoscale Thermoelectric Applications

The concept of using DNA molecules for designing nano-scale electronic systems has attracted researcher’s attention due to the unique properties of DNA, such as self-assembly and self-recognition. Thus, increased number of studies, theoretically and experimentally, have been carried out to study the possibility of adopting DNA molecules in designing nanoscale thermoelectric devices. In this work, a general expression of the electron transmission probability that describes the electron transfer through one strand DNA chain has been derived using the steady-state-formalism by assuming one strand of DNA molecules as line model. The energy-dependent transmission was studied, then energy-and temperature-dependent Seebeck coefficient, and thermoelectric characteristics of four one strand DNA sequences: (A-A)10, (C-C)10, (G-G)10 and (T-T)10 are theoretically studied. According to the obtained results, it is found that the transmission behavior (magnitude and position) is varying with the type of DNA sequence. Also, the energy dependent Seebeck coefficient (S-E) curves clearly show a nonlinear energy-dependence, while the relationship between Seebeck coefficient and temperature (S-T) is linear. Thermoelectric power factor as a function of temperature was found to be enhanced with the temperature increment for the four types of DNA nucleobases. The highest values of thermoelectric power factor belong to thymine (120Wm-1K-2) and cytosine (60 Wm-1K-2), that nominate them as outstanding candidate thermoelectric materials to be adopted in the fabrication of one strand DNA-base nanoscale thermoelectric devices.