On-site repulsion as the source of pairing in carbon nanotubes and intercalated graphite

We show that different non-conventional superconductors have one fundamental feature in common: pair eigenstates of the Hamiltonian are repulsion-free, the W = 0 pairs. In extended Hubbard models, pairing can occur for reasonable parameter values. For (N, N) nanotubes the binding energy of the pair depends strongly on the filling and decreases towards a reduced but nonzero value for the graphite sheet N → ∞. Received 13 July 2002 Published online 29 November 2002