<title>Collective resonances of C60, carbon onions, and carbon tubes</title>

Abstract

After the development of a method for macroscopic production of fullerenes, in particular the C60 molecule, a lot of attention has been given to the optical and collective properties of C60 in gas phase, solid and film. The more recent development in fullerene related research is the synthesis of coaxial carbon sheets, usually referred to as carbon tubes or nano tubes. Also spherical concentric graphitic shells called carbon onions have made the field still more exciting and opened the doorway to a new area of materials science. In this work we present how a model based on classical electrodynamics can be used to describe the collective dynamics of electrons in these systems and give insight into the most important physics. We demonstrate the existence of a rich spectrum of collective resonances for both carbon onions and carbon tubes. Evaluated polarizability, oscillator strength distributions, and the EELS loss function are compared to available experimental data and other theoretical studies for especially C60.© (1994) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.