Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 94
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2014-40570-4

Regular Article

Effects of rotation in the energy spectrum of C₆₀

¹ Departamento de Física, CCEN, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Caixa Postal 5008, 58051-900 João Pessoa, PB, Brazil
² Departamento de Física, CCEN, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 50670-901 Recife, PE, Brazil

^a e-mail: jonas.iasd@gmail.com

Received: 12 September 2013
Received in final form: 4 February 2014
Published online: 24 April 2014

Abstract

In this paper, motivated by the experimental evidence of rapidly rotating C₆₀ molecules in fullerite, we study the low-energy electronic states of rotating fullerene within a continuum model. In this model, the low-energy spectrum is obtained from an effective Dirac equation including non-Abelian gauge fields that simulate the pentagonal rings of the molecule. Rotation is incorporated into the model by solving the effective Dirac equation in the rotating referential frame. The exact analytical solution for the eigenfunctions and energy spectrum is obtained, yielding the previously known static results in the no rotation limit. Due to the coupling between rotation and total angular momentum, that appears naturally in the rotating frame, the zero modes of static C₆₀ are shifted and also suffer a Zeeman splitting whithout the presence of a magnetic field.