MODELING OF THE GEOMETRY AND ELECTRONIC BANDGAP STRUCTURE OF CHIRAL SINGLE WALLED CARBON NANOTUBES

Abstract

Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) are one-dimensional nanostructured materials that will play a key role in future electronics. All properties of the carbon nanotubes are determined by its electronic structure. The main focus of this study has been to investigate the basic electronic bandgap structure of the chiral single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). A simple algorithm is presented in order to model the geometry of the chiral single-walled CNTs with any desired structure. The electronic bandgap structure of the chiral single-walled carbon nanotubes has been studied by employing an extended tight binding model (TBM). The changes in the energy band gap due to the chirality effect in case of metallic (6, 3) SWCNT and in the semiconducting (12, 7) SWCNT are discussed here. The value of the SWCNTs diameter is calculated also. The computed results indicates that the bandgap depends inversely on the diameter of the tube. The present results were found to be in consistent with those reported in the literature and indicated the correctness of the process of simulation technique process.