Friday, May 4, 2007

Concerning pitch angles and groove widths of helically coiled carbon nanotubes

In the previous post, we have seen the good agreement for the geometries obtained from the beaded and computer-aided models respectively. A more general question to ask is how the pitch angle and groove width of a helically coiled carbon nanotube depend on the relative arrangement of pentagons and heptagons. I believe that the agreement of these two parameters could be used as a stringent test for the quality for the force field of the beaded representation. To perform this test, we need to work out the general classification scheme for the helically coiled carbon nanotubes. And the geometry optimization using force field such as Tersoff potential is needed. Of course, it is necessary to construct more different types of helically-coiled carbon nanotubes with beads.

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