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 tr ansfer in proteins, by making a quantitative comparison between the fu ll quantum model and the semiclassical model which has been used frequ ently for analytic and numerical calculations. Our goal is to gain ins ight into the range of validity of the semiclassical model in the part icular context of finite temperatures. Our results indicate that, at b iologically relevant temperatures, for the parameters chosen, the semi classical model gives practically the same results as the full quantum mechanical model.