  We investigate the effects of impurity scattering on the conductance of
metallic carbon nanotubes as a function of the relative separation of the
impurities. First we compute the conductance of a clean (6,6) tube, and the
effect of model gold contacts on this conductance. Then, we compute the effect
of introducing a single, two, and three oxygen atom impurities. We find that
the conductance of a single-oxygen-doped (6,6) nanotube decreases by about 30 %
with respect to that of the perfect nanotube. The presence of a second doping
atom induces strong changes of the conductance which, however, depend very
strongly on the relative position of the two oxygen atoms. We observe regular
oscillations of the conductance that repeat over an O-O distance that
corresponds to an integral number of half Fermi-wavelengths ($m\lambda_F/2$).
These fluctuations reflect strong electron interference phenomena produced by
electron scattering from the oxygen defects whose contribution to the
resistance of the tube cannot be obtained by simply summing up their individual
contributions.
