Optical properties of armchair (7,7) single walled carbon nanotubes

Full potential linearized augmented plane waves method with the generalized gradient approximation for the exchange-correlation potential was applied to calculate the optical properties of (7, 7) single walled carbon nanotubes. The both x and z directions of the incident photons were applied to estimate optical gaps, dielectric function, electron energy loss spectroscopies, optical conductivity, optical extinction, optical refractive index and optical absorption coefficient. The results predict that dielectric function, epsilon (omega), is anisotropic since it has higher peaks along z-direction than x-direction. The static optical refractive constant were calculated about 1.4 (z-direction) and 1.1 (x-direction). Moreover, the electron energy loss spectroscopy showed a sharp pi electron plasmon peaks at about 6 eV and 5 eV for z and x-directions respectively. The calculated reflection spectra show that directions perpendicular to the tube axis have further optical reflection. Moreover, z-direction indicates higher peaks at absorption spectra in low range energies. Totally, increasing the diameter of armchair carbon nanotubes cause the optical band gap, static optical refractive constant and optical reflectivity to decrease. On the other hand, increasing the diameter cause the optical absorption and the optical conductivity to increase. Moreover, the sharp peaks being illustrated at optical spectrum are related to the 1D structure of CNTs which confirm the accuracy of the calculations. (C) 2015 Author(s).