Eur. Phys. J. B 66, 433-438 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00447-7

Surface and quantum-size effects on the specific heat of layered and nonlayered nanotubes

¹ College of Science, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 210016, Nanjing, P.R. China
² Department of Physics, Xiangtan University, 411105, Xiangtan, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a shauyang@xtu.edu.cn

Received: 28 July 2008
Revised: 13 October 2008
Published online: 9 December 2008

Abstract

A detailed analysis of room temperature specific heat of unrelaxed layered and nonlayered nanotubes is presented. Our results exhibit a close interplay between surface and quantization contributions of specific heat, i.e. C_surface and C_quantum. The calculated specific heat of single-layer and multi-layer layered nanotubes increases with diameter regardless of the species. However, slowly increasing C_quantum and rapidly decreasing C_surface with diameter result in the decrease of specific heat of nonlayered nanotubes. Moreover, our theoretical results are compared with experimental observation and physical mechanisms are discussed. These results imply that the existence of surface in nonlayered nanotubes has an important influence on specific heat.