Elucidation of the electronic structure of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes by electroabsorption spectroscopy

We report benchmark calculations of electroabsorption in semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes to provide motivation to experimentalists to perform electroabsorption measurement on these systems. We show that electroabsorption can detect continuum bands in different energy manifolds, even as other nonlinear absorption measurements have failed to detect them. Direct determination of the binding energies of excitons in higher manifolds thereby becomes possible. We also find that electroabsorption can provide evidence for Fano-type coupling between the second exciton and the lowest continuum band states.