Interfacial water facilitates energy transfer by inducing extended vibrations in membrane lipids.

We report the complete assignment of the vibrational spectrum of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC), which belongs to the most ubiquitous membrane phospholipid family, phosphatidylcholine. We find that water hydrating the lipid headgroups enables efficient energy transfer across membrane leaflets on sub-picosecond time scales. The emergence of spatially extended vibrational modes upon hydration, underlies this phenomenon. Our findings illustrate the importance of collective molecular behavior of biomembranes and reveal that hydrated lipid membranes can act as efficient media for the transfer of vibrational energy.

Hydration strongly affects the molecular and electronic structure of membrane phospholipids.

We investigate the structure and electronic properties of phosphatidylcholine (PC) under different degrees of hydration at the single-molecule and monolayer type level by linear scaling ab initio calculations. Upon hydration, the phospholipid undergoes drastic long-range conformational rearrangements which lead to a sickle-like ground-state shape. The structural unit of the tilted gel-phase PC appears to be a water-bridged PC dimer. We find that hydration dramatically alters the surface potential, dipole and quadrupole moments of the lipids and consequently guides the interactions of the lipids with other molecules and the communication between cells.

Stone-Wales defects can cause a metal-semiconductor transition in carbon nanotubes depending on their orientation.

It has been shown that the two different orientations of Stone-Wales (SW) defects, i.e. longitudinal and circumferential SW defects, on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) result in two different electronic structures. Based on density functional theory we have shown that the longitudinal SW defects do not open a bandgap near the Fermi energy, while a relatively small bandgap emerges in tubes with circumferential defects. We argue that the bandgap opening in the presence of circumferential SW defects is a consequence of long-range symmetry breaking which can spread all the way along the tube. Specifically, the distribution of contracted and stretched bond lengths due to the presence of defects, and hopping energies for low-energy electrons, i.e. the 2p(z) electrons, show two different patterns for the two types of defects. Interplay between the geometric features and the electronic properties of the tubes have also been studied for different defect concentrations. Considering π-orbital charge density, it has also been shown that the deviations of bond lengths from their relaxed length result in different doping for two defect orientations around the defects-electron-rich for a circumferential defect and hole-rich for a longitudinal one. We have also shown that, in the tubes having both types of defects, circumferential defects would dominate and impose their electronic properties.