  While ubiquitous, energy redistribution remains a poorly understood facet of
the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of biomolecules. At the molecular level,
finite-size effects, pronounced nonlinearities, and ballistic processes produce
behavior that diverges from the macroscale. Here, we show that transient
thermal transport reflects macromolecular energy landscape architecture through
the topological characteristics of molecular contacts and the nonlinear
processes that mediate dynamics. While the former determines transport pathways
via pairwise interactions, the latter reflects frustration within the landscape
for local conformational rearrangements. Unlike transport through
small-molecule systems, such as alkanes, nonlinearity dominates over coherent
processes at even quite short time- and length-scales. Our exhaustive all-atom
simulations and novel local-in-time and space analysis, applicable to both
theory and experiment, permit dissection of energy migration in biomolecules.
The approach demonstrates that vibrational energy transport can probe otherwise
inaccessible aspects of macromolecular dynamics and interactions that underly
biological function.
