Heat transport induced by electron transfer: A general temperature quantum calculation

Electron transfer dominates chemical processes in biological, inorganic and materialchemistry. Energetic aspects of such phenomena, in particular the energy transferassociated with the electron transfer process have received little past attention, butare important in designing energy conversion devices. This paper generalizes ourearlier work in this direction, which was based on the semiclassical Marcus theory ofelectron transfer. It provides, within a simple model, a unied framework that includes the deep (nuclear) tunneling limit of electron transfer and the associated heat transfer, when the donor and acceptor sites are seated in environments, characterized by different local temperatures. The electron transfer induced heat conduction is shown to go through a maximum at some intermediate average temperature where quantum effects are already appreciable, and approaches zero when the average temperature is very high (the classical limit) or very low (deep tunneling).