Continuum model of optical phonons in a nanotube

The properties of nanotubes are of intense current interest due, in part, to the discovery of the carbon nanotube. In this paper, the optical phonons are modeled for a nanotube by treating the nanotube as a continuum medium. A quantization prescription is applied to facilitate the first determination of the quantum-mechanical normalizations of selected optical phonon modes. It is shown that normalization of the lowest azimuthal mode may be determined analytically. The deformation potentials describing carrier optical-phonon scattering are readily determined from these normalized continuum modes. (C) 2001 Academic Press.