Influencing range of vacancy defects in zigzag single-walled carbon nanotubes

The influencing range of a vacancy defect in a zigzag single-walled nanotube is characterized with both structural deformation and variation in bandstructure. This paper proposes a microscopic explanation to relate the structural deformation to the bandstructure variation. With an increasing defect density, the nanotubes become oblate and the energy gap between the deep localized gap state and the conducting band minimum state decreases. Theoretical results shed some light on the local energy gap engineering via vacancy density for future potential applications.