Spontaneous twisting and shrinking of carbon nanotubes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how single-wall carbon nanotubes spontaneously twist and shrink due to deformation effects, with detailed calculations showing dependence on nanotube chirality and diameter.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of spontaneous deformation in nanotubes using a tight-binding model, including explicit deformation parameters across various nanotube types.

Findings

Nanotubes tend to twist and shrink spontaneously at zero temperature.

Deformation parameters vary with nanotube diameter and chirality.

Spectral gap changes depend on nanotube chirality.

Abstract

Deformations of single-wall carbon nanotubes are investigated within the tight-binding model with deformation-dependent hopping energies. We show that the nanotubes tend to twist and shrink spontaneously at zero temperature. The explicit values of the deformation parameters are computed for a wide range of nanotubes with varying diameter and chirality. The changes of the spectral gap associated with the spontaneous deformation are shown to depend on the chirality of the nanotubes.