Dependence of electronic and optical properties on a high-frequency field for carbon nanotubes

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates how high-frequency electromagnetic fields influence the electronic and optical properties of zigzag single-wall carbon nanotubes, revealing dependencies useful for energy spectrum analysis and microwave detection.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of high-frequency effects on carbon nanotubes' electronic and optical properties using nonequilibrium Green's functions.

Findings

Density of states depends on electron energy, field strength, and frequency.

Conductance decreases with increasing field strength at high electron energies.

Optical functions exhibit rich structures varying with field frequency.

Abstract

We study theoretically the electronic structure, transport and optical properties for a zigzag single-wall carbon nanotube connected to two normal conductor leads under the irradiation of an external electromagnetic field at low temperatures, with particular emphasis on the features of high-frequency response. Using the standard nonequilibrium Green's function techniques, we examine the time-averaged density of states, the conductivity, the dielectric function and the electron energy loss spectra for the system with photon polarization parallel with the tunneling current direction, respectively. Through some numerical examples, it is shown that the density of states is strongly dependent on the incident electron energy, the strength and frequency of the applied field. For higher electron energies in comparison with lead-nanotube coupling energy, the system conductance decreases with increasing the field strength and increases with increasing the field frequency respectively, and shows some oscillation structures. Moreover, the optical functions for the system have also a rich structure with the variation of field frequency. It may demonstrate that this transport dependence on the external field parameters can be used to give the energy spectra information of carbon nanotubes and to detect the high-frequency microwave irradiation.