COMPARISON OF QUANTUM MONTE-CARLO AND SEMICLASSICAL MONTE-CARLO RESULTS IN INVESTIGATIONS OF THE THERMAL-STABILITY OF DAVYDOV SOLITONS

We study the problem of the thermal stability of the Davydov soliton, in the context of its viability as providing a mechanism for energy transfer in proteins, by making a quantitative comparison between the full quantum model and the semiclassical model which has been used frequently for analytic and numerical calculations. Our goal is to gain insight into the range of validity of the semiclassical model in the particular context of finite temperatures. Our results indicate that, at biologically relevant temperatures, for the parameters chosen, the semiclassical model gives practically the same results as the full quantum mechanical model.