Carbon- and silicon-capped silicon carbide nanotubes: An ab initio study

A systematic study of fullerene hemisphere capped finite SiC nanotubes is presented. The tubes are spin optimized using the hybrid functional B3LYP (Becke?s three-parameter exchange and the Lee-Yang-Parr correlation functionals) and an all electron 3-21G^? basis. Capping of a SiC nanotube changes cohesive energy, HOMO-LUMO gap and other electronic and geometric properties of a SiC nanotube. Also, the carbon-capped SiC nanotubes are energetically preferable compared to silicon-capped tubes. For example, the binding energy per atom for hydrogen-terminated “infinite” SiC nanotube (5,5) having five unit cells is 4.993 eV, the corresponding numbers being 5.989 eV and 4.812 eV for C-capped and Si-capped nanotubes, respectively.