Electronic specific heat of DNA: Effects of backbones and disorder

• Electronic specific heat (CvCv) of DNA being studied.
• Four different DNA sequences are used – ranging from periodic, quasiperiodic to random.
• Effects of backbone structure and environment studied in details.
• At low temperature CvCv decreases with increasing disorder and opposite behavior observed in the high temperature regime.
• Variation of specific heat w.r.t. both disorder and temperature is quite unique irrespective of sequential variety.

In the present work we report the results of our investigation of the electronic specific heat (ESH) of DNA molecule modeled within the tight-binding framework. We take four different DNA sequences ranging from periodic, quasi-periodic to random and studied both ESH and also the density of states to supplement our ESH results. The role of the backbone structure and the effects of environment on ESH is discussed. We observe that irrespective of the sequences there is a universal response of the ESH spectra for a given disorder. The nature of response of specific heat for backbone disorder is totally opposite in low and high temperature regimes.