Local and Global Electronic Effects in Single and Double Boron-Doped Carbon Nanotubes

The foreign atom doping influences the properties of carbon materials, and it is a possible way of designing materials of desired characteristics. Density functional calculations have been carried out on various isomers of boron-doped (4,0) and (9,0) carbon nanotubes as templates to investigate the doping effect on the structure and electronic properties on such systems. The results indicate that these boron-doped carbon nanotubes show local structural changes, mostly due to the elongation of bonds. The insertion of heteroatoms perturbs the π-conjugation system, which, in effect, destabilizes the material through higher energy cost of formation. The position of the foreign atom controls the new organization of electron density and leads to one of two possible distributions, viz., global (where electron density is distributed over the molecular surface) or local (localized distribution of electron density). This feature, in turn, can influence the bonding of the reactants while interacting with the surface. The charge distribution at a particular boron-doped site always possesses the local characteristics with a positively charged boron atom surrounded by negatively charged carbons. Such a character is also a measure of the driving force for influencing the substitution reaction in the vicinity of boron through an ionic mechanism.