I'm looking into nanotubes and I thought I'd assure myself that the basic geometry equations are indeed correct. No problems for the radius, I quickly found the known formula:
R=√3(n2+m2+nm)dCC2π
if dCC is the carbon bond length.
For the chiral angle, however, the equation should be
tanθ=m√32n+m
but I got
tanθ=m√32n−m,
a sign difference. I thought I'd look for the mistake and quickly correct it, but I cannot for the life of me find it. I'll show my derivation below. The starting point is of course the nanotube structure:
I'll simplify this picture to make it more clear what I did:
From the above picture, it's easy to see that
sinθ=hna1
and
sin(120∘−θ)=hma2.
This can be rewritten using the trigonometric identity
sin(α−β)=sinαcosβ−cosαsinβ
where α=120∘ and β=θ, giving rise to
√32cosθ+12sinθ=hma2.
Now, using the fact that a1=a2(=√3dCC), we find the following equations:
{nsinθ=ha1m[√32cosθ+12sinθ]=ha1
which obviously allow for combination:
nmsinθ=√32cosθ+12sinθ(nm−12)sinθ=√32cosθ2n−m2msinθ=√32cosθtanθ=m√32n−m.
This differs from the known expression in that it has a minus sign in front of m in the denominator, but I fail to see my mistake. It could be really silly and I'm just being blind... Thanks for taking a look at it.
Answer
The angle at C is not 120∘−θ, it's 180∘−(120∘+θ)=60∘−θ. The rest of the algebra is right, and you can quickly see where the sign comes from.
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