Energetics and Electronic Structures of Carbon Nanotubes Encapsulating Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Molecules

We report total-energy electronic structure calculations that provide energetics of the encapsulation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules coronene, sumanene, and corannulene into carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and electronic structures of the resulting carbon hybrid structures. Our calculations elucidate that the encapsulation of these PAHs into CNTs is an exothermic reaction for nanotubes with indexes of (16, 0), (17, 0), and (18, 0) or thicker for coronene, sumanene, and corannulene molecules, respectively, and that the energy gain upon encapsulation is up to 1 eV per molecule. We also find that the stacking arrangement of encapsulated PAH molecules depends on the molecular species and inner spacing of the CNTs: coronene is tilted to the CNT axis in its stable conformation, sumanene is stacked normal to the CNT axis, and corannulene is randomly arranged along the CNT axis. The electron states of the PAH-CNT hybrids depend on both the space inside the CNTs and the tilting angle of the PAH molecules with respect to the CNTs, leading to substantial hybridization between 3 states of the PAH molecules and CNTs.