Carbon nanotube field emission electron sources

Abstract

Building successful vacuum electron devices using carbon nanotube field emitters requires a fundamental understanding of nanotube emission characteristics. Through detailed investigations of field emission from individual single-walled and multi-walled nanotubes, we identified and characterized phenomena that play a dominant role in device behavior. These include adsorbate interactions, current saturation, field-induced evaporation, environmental degradation, and movement in electric fields. In many cases, these intrinsic behaviors directly translate into device design parameters such as the layout of the field emitter structures, optimum current requirements from each emitter, emission current uniformity specifications, and operating environments for commercial vacuum microelectronic devices. In this paper, we present the fundamental field emission properties of carbon nanotubes and discuss recent progress in the development of large area electron sources for field emission displays.