Electronic structure of carbon nanotori: the roles of curvature, hybridization, anddisorder

Abstract

An efficient and reasonable procedure is proposed for calculating theelectronic structure of carbon nanotori in terms of rotational symmetry,within the tight binding formalism. It is shown that the curvature inducedσ*–π* hybridization effects play an important role in determining the electronic structure ofthis novel nanostructure. The energy gap of the carbon nanotorus exhibits awell defined oscillation feature with increasing size of the torus, converging tothat of the corresponding infinite nanotube, while its density of states spectrumevolves from the characteristic of a zero dimensional system to that of a quasi-onedimensional system. Effects of disorder on the electronic properties are also discussed.