ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Quantum Sci. Technol.
Sec. Basic Science for Quantum Technologies
Correlated disorder as a tunable switch between trapping and conduction in quantum ion channels
Provisionally accepted
- 1Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
- 2Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Instituto de Fisica, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Quantum transport efficiency is influenced by mechanisms beyond coherence, including correlated disorder, which can balance localization and mobility to produce anomalous phenomena such as quantum rogue waves. Motivated by the work of Buarque et al.1, we investigate the impact of correlated on-site energies in a linear quantum chain modeling a biological ion channel. The system is described by a tight-binding Hamiltonian with Lindblad operators representing source and drain. The average traversal time across the channel increases logarithmically with the correlation parameter, mirroring the growth of rogue-wave probability and indicating the emergence of temporary trapped states that slow transport. These results demonstrate that correlated disorder significantly influences ion transport even in small disordered systems.
Keywords: conduction, Correlated disorder, quantum ion channels, Tight-binding Hamiltonian, trapping localization
Received: 16 Oct 2025; Accepted: 11 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 DA SILVA RAMOS, Gandolfi Lanzini, Prado and Brunnet. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: IARA PATRICIA DA SILVA RAMOS
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.