  We consider the excitation of electrons in semiconducting carbon nanotubes by
photons from the evanescent field created by a subwavelength-diameter optical
fiber. The strongly changing evanescent field of such nanofibers requires
dropping the dipole approximation. We show that this leads to novel effects,
especially a high dependence of the photon absorption on the relative
orientation and geometry of the nanotube-nanofiber setup in the optical and
near infrared domain. In particular, we calculate photon absorption
probabilities for a straight nanotube and nanofiber depending on their relative
angle. Nanotubes orthogonal to the fiber are found to perform much better than
parallel nanotubes when they are short. As the nanotube gets longer the
absorption of parallel nanotubes is found to exceed the orthogonal nanotubes
and approach 100% for extremely long nanotubes. In addition, we show that if
the nanotube is wrapped around the fiber in an appropriate way the absorption
is enhanced. We find that optical and near infrared photons could be converted
to excitations with efficiencies that may exceed 90%. This may provide
opportunities for future photodetectors and we discuss possible setups.
