The Study of Nano/Micro Electron Field Emitters for Field Emission Beam Applications

Abstract

The simulation and experiment of nano/micro electron field emitters were investigated in this paper. The results indicated that the space-charge effect due to the emitted electrons is important in determining the field-emission current from a nano-emitter because of the shielding effect from the charge particles. Besides, from our FE model results, scaling the emitter radius and gate aperture of FE nanotriodes to smaller dimensions will lower the operating voltage and overcome the space-charge effects. Moreover, we also grow the well aligned MWCNTs by MPCVD to compare with the random MWCNTs by Thermal CVD. The results presented that well-aligned will induced the stable field emission properties and the open thiolated well-align carbon nanotube field emitter showed the best field emission results.