Thursday, 14 July 2016

geometry - Nanotube chiral angle as a function of n and m


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=m32n+m


but I got


tanθ=m32nm,


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:


Nanotube structure


I'll simplify this picture to make it more clear what I did:


Simplified picture


From the above picture, it's easy to see that



sinθ=hna1


and


sin(120θ)=hma2.


This can be rewritten using the trigonometric identity


sin(αβ)=sinαcosβcosαsinβ


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(nm12)sinθ=32cosθ2nm2msinθ=32cosθtanθ=m32nm.


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 120θ, it's 180(120+θ)=60θ. The rest of the algebra is right, and you can quickly see where the sign comes from.


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