Adsorption on carbon nanotubes: quantum spin tubes, magnetization plateaus, and conformal symmetry

Abstract

We formulate the problem of adsorption onto the surface of a carbon nanotube as a lattice gas on a triangular lattice wrapped around a cylinder. This model is equivalent to an XXZ Heisenberg quantum spin tube. The geometric frustration due to wrapping leads generically to four magnetization plateaus, in contrast to the two on a flat graphite sheet. We obtain analytical and numerical results for the magnetizations and transition fields for armchair, zig-zag and chiral nanotubes. The zig-zags are exceptional in that one of the plateaus has extensive zero temperature entropy in the classical limit. Quantum effects lift up the degeneracy, leaving gapless excitations which are described by a $c=1$ conformal field theory with compactification radius quantized by the tube circumference.