Broken symmetry and pseudogaps in ropes of carbon nanotubes

Paul Delaney, Hyoung Joon Choi, Jisoon Ihm, Steven G. Louie () and Marvin L. Cohen
Additional contact information
Paul Delaney: University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Hyoung Joon Choi: University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jisoon Ihm: University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Steven G. Louie: University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Marvin L. Cohen: University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Nature, 1998, vol. 391, issue 6666, 466-468

Abstract: Abstract Since the discovery of carbon nanotubes1, it has been speculated that these materials should behave like nanoscale wires with unusual electronic properties and exceptional strength. Recently, ‘ropes’ of close-packed single-wall nanotubes have been synthesized in high yield2. The tubes in these ropes are mainly of the (10,10) type3, which is predicted to be metallic4,5,6. Experiments on individual nanotubes and ropes7,8 indicate that these systems indeed have transport properties that qualify them to be viewed as nanoscale quantum wires at low temperature. It has been expected that the close-packing of individual nanotubes into ropes does not change their electronic properties significantly. Here, however, we present first-principles calculations which show that a broken symmetry of the (10,10) tube caused by interactions between tubes in a rope induces a pseudogap of about 0.1 eV at the Fermi level. This pseudogap strongly modifies many of the fundamental electronic properties: we predict a semimetal-like temperature dependence of the electrical conductivity and a finite gap in the infrared absorption spectrum. The existence of both electron and hole charge carriers will lead to qualitatively different thermopower and Hall-effect behaviours from those expected for a normal metal.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35099 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:391:y:1998:i:6666:d:10.1038_35099

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35099

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().