Surface Exciton-Plasmons in Carbon Nanotubes*

We study theoretically the interactions of excitonic states with surface electromagnetic modes of a single-walled carbon nanotube. We use our previously developed Green's function formalism to quantize an electromagnetic field in the presence of quasi-1D absorbing bodies [1]. We show that these interactions result in the exciton-plasmon coupling that is significant in its strength due to the presence of weakly-dispersive low-energy ($\sim $0.5-2eV) interband surface plasmon modes [2] and large exciton excitation energies $\sim $1eV in small-diameter nanotubes [3]. We estimate the exciton-plasmon Rabi splitting to be $\sim $0.01-0.1eV which is close to that observed in organic semiconductors [4] and much larger than that reported for hybrid semiconductor-metal nanoparticle molecules [5]. We calculate the exciton absorption lineshape and demonstrate a clear line splitting effect as the exciton energy is tuned to the closest interband surface plasmon resonance. \newline [1] I.V.Bondarev and Ph.Lambin, Phys. Rev. B72, 035451 (2005). [2] T.Pichler, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 4729 (1998). [3] D.Spataru, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 247402 (2005). [4] J.Belessa, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 036404 (2004). [5] W.Zhang, A.O.Govorov, G.W.Bryant, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 146804 (2006).