Carbon nanotubes immersed in superfluid helium: the Impact of quantum confinement on wetting and capillary action

7 págs.; 5 figs.; 1 tab. ; Associated content mp4 video: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b02414A recent experimental study [Ohba, Sci. Rep. 2016, 6, 28992] of gas adsorption on single-walled carbon nanotubes at temperatures between 2 and 5 K reported a quenched propagation of helium through carbon nanotubes with diameters below 7 Å despite the small kinetic diameter of helium atoms. After assessing the performance of a potential model for the He−nanotube interaction via ab initio calculations with density functional theorybased symmetry adapted perturbation theory, we apply orbital-free helium density functional theory to show that the counterintuitive experimental result is a consequence of the exceptionally high zeropoint energy of helium and its tendency to form spatially separated layers of helium upon adsorption at the lowest temperatures. Helium filling factors are derived for a series of carbon nanotubes and compared to the available experimental data. © 2016 American Chemical SocietyThis work has been supported by the COST Action CM1405 “Molecules in Motion (MOLIM)”. M.P.d.L.-C. gratefully acknowledges support from MINECO (Spain) under Grant MAT2016-75354-P and thanks the CTI (CSIC) and CESGA supercomputer facilities (Spain) for the resources provided.Peer reviewe