Excitonic absorption intensity of semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes

Abstract

The knowledge of the intrinsic absorption intensity of each carbon nanotube is of crucial importance for the optical assignment of nanotube species and the estimation of their abundance in a sample. Based on a microscopic approach, we calculate excitonic absorption spectra for a variety of semiconducting and metallic nanotubes, revealing a clear diameter, chirality, and family dependence of the absorption intensity. In particular, we also study the appearance of excited excitonic transitions, which are shown to be well pronounced for semiconducting nanotubes, reaching intensities of up to 10% of the main transition. We find that nanotubes with large diameters show the most pronounced absorption intensities, confirming well the experimentally observed trend. Depending on the CNT family and transition, the absorption is enhanced or reduced with the chiral angle. This behavior reflects well the qualitative chirality dependence of the analytically derived optical matrix element.