  We present a tight binding theory to analyze the motion of electrons between
carbon nanotubes bundled into a carbon nanotube rope. The theory is developed
starting from a description of the propagating Bloch waves on ideal tubes, and
the effects of intertube motion are treated perturbatively in this basis.
Expressions for the interwall tunneling amplitudes between states on
neighboring tubes are derived which show the dependence on chiral angles and
intratube crystal momenta. We find that conservation of crystal momentum along
the tube direction suppresses interwall coherence in a carbon nanorope
containing tubes with random chiralities. Numerical calculations are presented
which indicate that electronic states in a rope are localized in the transverse
direction with a coherence length corresponding to a tube diameter.
