Deterministic Cold Cathode Electron Emission from Carbon Nanofibre Arrays

The ability to accurately design carbon nanofibre (CN) field emitters with predictable electron emission characteristics will enable their use as electron sources in various applications such as microwave amplifiers, electron microscopy, parallel beam electron lithography and advanced Xray sources....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2014-05, Vol.4 (1), p.4840-4840, Article 4840
Main Authors: Cole, Matthew T., Teo, Kenneth B. K., Groening, Oliver, Gangloff, Laurent, Legagneux, Pierre, Milne, William I.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Accuracy
Arrays
Carbon
Central nervous system
Electric fields
Electron microscopy
Emissions
Humanities and Social Sciences
Mapping
Microscopy
multidisciplinary
Reproducibility
Scanning
Science
Simulation
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Summary:The ability to accurately design carbon nanofibre (CN) field emitters with predictable electron emission characteristics will enable their use as electron sources in various applications such as microwave amplifiers, electron microscopy, parallel beam electron lithography and advanced Xray sources. Here, highly uniform CN arrays of controlled diameter, pitch and length were fabricated using plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition and their individual emission characteristics and field enhancement factors were probed using scanning anode field emission mapping. For a pitch of 10 µm and a CN length of 5 µm, the directly measured enhancement factors of individual CNs was 242, which was in excellent agreement with conventional geometry estimates (240). We show here direct empirical evidence that in regular arrays of vertically aligned CNs the overall enhancement factor is reduced when the pitch between emitters is less than half the emitter height, in accordance to our electrostatic simulations. Individual emitters showed narrow Gaussian-like field enhancement distributions, in excellent agreement with electric field simulations.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep04840