Electronic structure of conducting carbon nanotubes

Recent developments using synthetic methods typical of fullerene production have been used to generate graphitic nanotubes with diameters on the order of fullerene diameters: "carbon nanotubes". Recent work by Thess, et al.suggests that [10,10] carbon nanotubes with diameters of 1.38 nm have been observed with high conductivities. This structure belongs to the same serpentine ([n,n]) family of nanotubes as the [5,5] carbon nanotube theoretically shown to have electronic states appropriate for high conductivity in our earlier work. We have calculated the electronic structure for this high-symmetry [10,10] carbon nanotube using a first-principles, self-consistent, all-electron Gaussian-orbital based local-density functional approach to calculate the band structure. We find that the electronic structure results are similar in band width and behavior near the Fermi level to our earlier results for the [5,5] nanotube.