The electronic properties of (n,0) single-walled carbon nanotubes with Stone-Wales defects were investigated by using the tight-binding Green’s function method and real-space renormalization techniques. It was found that the interaction between two Stone-Wales defects was long-ranged, with a characteristic length of several nanometers. The characteristic length, reflecting the effective functional range of topological defects, coincided with earlier observations of defects in carbon nanotubes via scanning tunneling spectroscopy. By means of a monatomic chain model, the long-range interaction was revealed to be a general feature of one-dimensional defected semiconducting systems, which could be equivalently described in terms of low-barrier quantum tunneling.

Long-Range Interaction Between Stone-Wales Defects in Zigzag Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes. T.Zhou, L.Yang, J.Wu, W.Duan, B.L.Gu: Physical Review B, 2005, 72[19], 193407