We investigate atomic and electronic structures of boron nanotubes (BNTs) by using the density functional theory (DFT). The transport properties of BNTs with different diameters and chiralities are studied by the Keldysh nonequilibrium Green function (NEGF) method. It is found that the cohesive energies and conductances of BNTs decrease as their diameters decrease. It is more difficult to form (N, 0) tubes than (M, M) tubes when the diameters of the two kinds of tubes are comparable. However, the (N, 0) tubes have a higher conductance than the (M, M) tubes. When the BNTs are connected to gold electrodes, the coupling between the BNTs and the electrodes will affect the transport properties of tubes significantly.
The atomic and electronic structures of a graphene monolayer on a Ru(0001) surface under compressive strain are investigated by using first-principles calculations.Three models of graphene monolayers with different carbon periodicities due to the lattice mismatch are proposed in the presence and the absence of the Ru(0001) substrate separately.Considering the strain induced by the lattice mismatch,we optimize the atomic structures and investigate the electronic properties of the graphene.Our calculation results show that the graphene layers turn into periodic corrugations and there exist strong chemical bonds in the interface between the graphene N × N superlattice and the substrate.The strain does not induce significant changes in electronic structure.Furthermore,the results calculated in the local density approximation (LDA) are compared with those obtained in the generalized gradient approximation (GGA),showing that the LDA results are more reasonable than the GGA results when only two substrate layers are used in calculation.
We investigate the electronic structures of one and two monolayer iron phthalocyanine (FePc) molecules on Au(111) surfaces. The first monolayer FePc is lying flat on the Au(111) substrate, and the second monolayer FePc is tilted at -15° relative to the substrate plane along the nearest neighbour [101] direction with a lobe downward to the central hole of the unit cell in the first layer. The structural information obtained by first-principles calculations is in agreement with the experiment results. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the electronic structures of FePc molecules in one-monolayer FePc/Au(111) system are perturbed significantly, while the electronic structures of FePc molecules in the second monolayer in two-monolayer FePc/Au(111) system remain almost unchanged due to the screening of the buffer layer on Au(111).