Broken Symmetries in Scanning Tunneling Images of Carbon Nanotubes

Abstract

Scanning tunneling images of carbon nanotubes frequently show electron distributions which break the local sixfold symmetry of the graphene sheet. We present a theory of these images which relates these anisotropies to the off diagonal correlations in the single particle density matrix, and allows one to extract these correlations from the observed images. The theory is applied to images of the low energy states reflected at the end of a tube or by point defects, and to states propagating on defect free semiconducting tubes. The latter exhibit a novel switching of the anisotropy in the tunneling image with the sign of the tunneling bias.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Imaging Electron Wave Functions of Quantized Energy Levels in Carbon Nanotubes
• Atomic resolution STM imaging of a twisted single-wall carbon nanotube

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Local Spectral Weight of a Luttinger Liquid: Effects from Edges and Impurities
• Lattice defects and boundaries in conducting carbon nanotubes
• Imaging the symmetry breaking of molecular orbitals in carbon nanotubes
• Coupled study by TEM/EELS and STM/STS of electronic properties of C- and CNx-nanotubes
• Static and dynamic image potential for tunneling into a Luttinger liquid
• Rotation Symmetry Spontaneous Breaking of Edge States in Zigzag Carbon Nanotubes