Incommensurate double-walled carbon nanotubes as one-dimensional moire crystals

The cylindrical multishell structure is one of the prevalent atomic arrangements in nanowires. Being multishell, the well-defined atomic periodicity is hardly realized in it because the periodic units of individual shells therein generally do not match except for very few cases, posing a challenge to understanding its physical properties. Here we show that moire patterns generated by superimposing atomic lattices of individual shells are decisive in determining its electronic structures. Double-walled carbon nanotubes, as an example, are shown to have spectacular variations in their electronic properties from metallic to semiconducting and further to insulating states depending on their moire patterns, even when they are composed of only semiconducting nanotubes with almost similar energy gaps and diameters. Thus, aperiodic multishell nanowires can be classified into one-dimensional moire crystals with distinct electronic structures.