Longitudinal solitons in carbon nanotubes

Abstract

We present the results on the soliton excitations in carbon nanotubes (CNT) using Brenner's many-body potential. Our numerical simulations demonstrate high soliton stability in (10, 10) CNT. The interactions of solitons and solitary excitations with CNT defects are found to be inelastic if the excita-

Lattice vibrations of armchair carbon nanotubes: phonons, soliton deformations and lattice discreteness effects

“…It is useful to underline the qualitative agreement between the behaviour reflected by curve of figure 2 and result of ref. [13] on longitudinal solitons(see figure 2 in this paper) which we recall it, uses the Brenner potential. We will close this section by looking at the energetics of the radial soliton defect obtained in (13).…”

“…The recent interest to excitations in carbon nanotubes was also directed toward modes involving amplitudes more larger than phonons. Solitons, which are robust objects describing these large-amplitude excitations, have so far been suggested in two main distinct ways [12,13]. The first [12] relates to the spontaneous lattice distorsion responsible for the dimerization of the electronic groundstate of the nanotube.…”

“…by writing down a total Hamiltonian consisting of a kinetic energy which describes the tube dynamics, and a potential energy accounting for the many-body interaction. The potential energy in this last case connects to the Brenner potential [14], which in the particular context of the paper [13] is expanded for weak interatomic displacements. Interestingly, this expansion leads to a generalized nonlinear differential equation which is just the so-called nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation, and which can in principle be transformed into any of the known dispersive nonlinear equations as the Nonlinear Schrödinger equation, Korteweg-de Vrie equation [15], etc.…”

“…In this work, we will attempt to formulate the Hamiltonian description of the soliton excitation in single-wall nanotubes in terms of radial solitons. To remain as close as possible to the theory developed in [13], we keep the spirit of the many-body interaction generating both the dispersion and nonlinearity in the system dynamics. However, unlike this work we will use a generalized LennardJones [16,17] potential hereafter called "Lennard-Jones hierarchy"(LJh).…”

“…In fact, this first kind of soliton excitation is well known in systems undergoing Peierls instabilities, where it forms the state of broken symmetries then called domain wall. The second kind of soliton [13] follows from the Hamiltonian description of the nanotube dynamics, i.e. by writing down a total Hamiltonian consisting of a kinetic energy which describes the tube dynamics, and a potential energy accounting for the many-body interaction.…”