Chirality-dependent, van der Waals-London dispersion interactions of carbon nanotube systems

The Lifshitz formulation is a quantum electrodynamic, first principals formulation used to determine van der Waals - London dispersion interactions in the continuum limit. It has many advantages over crude, pairwise potential models. Most notably, it can solve for complex interactions (e.g. repulsive and multi-body effects) and determine the vdW-Ld interaction magnitude and sign a priori from the optical properties rather than by parameterization. Single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) represent an ideal class of materials to study vdW-Ld interactions because very small changes in their geometrical construction, via the chirality vector [n,m], can result in vastly different electronic and optical properties. These chirality-dependent optical properties ultimately lead to experimentally exploitable vdW-Ld interactions, which already exist in the literature.Proper use of the Lifshitz formulation requires 1) An analytical extension for the geometry being studied 2) The optical properties of all materials present and 3) A method to incorporate spatially varying properties. This infrastructure needed to be developed to study the vdW-Ld interactions of SWCNTs systems because they were unavailable at the onset. The biggest shortfall was the lack of the E" optical properties out to 30+ eV.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Rajter, Richard F

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• W. Craig Carter and Yet-Ming Chiang.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46670

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/46670