Locally Resolved Electron Emission Area and Unified View of Field Emission from Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Films
[3]
- Department of Physics, The George Washington University, 725 21st Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20052, United States; Euclid TechLabs, 365 Remington Boulevard, Bolingbrook, Illinois 60440, United States
- PSD Enrico Fermi Institute, The University of Chicago, 5720 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, United States
- Euclid TechLabs, 365 Remington Boulevard, Bolingbrook, Illinois 60440, United States
- Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Argonne, Illinois 60439, United States
One of the common problems in case of field emission from polycrystalline diamond films, which typically have uniform surface morphology, is uncertainty in determining exact location of electron emission sites across the surface. Although several studies have suggested that grain boundaries are the main electron emission source, it is not particularly clear what makes some sites emit more than the others. It is also practically unclear how one could quantify the actual electron emission area and therefore field emission current per unit area. In this paper we study the effect of actual, locally resolved, field emission (FE) area on electron emission characteristics of uniform planar highly conductive nitrogen-incorporated ultrananocrystalline diamond ((N)UNCD) field emitters. It was routinely found that field emission from as-grown planar (N)UNCD films is always confined to a counted number of discrete emitting centers across the surface which varied in size and electron emissivity. It was established that the actual FE area critically depends on the applied electric field, as well as that the actual FE area and the overall electron emissivity improve with sp2 fraction present in the film irrespectively of the original substrate roughness and morphology. To quantify the actual FE area and its dependence on the applied electric field, imaging experiments were carried out in a vacuum system in a parallel-plate configuration with a specialty anode phosphor screen. Electron emission micrographs were taken concurrently with I-V characteristics measurements. In addition, a novel automated image processing algorithm was developed to process extensive imaging datasets and calculate emission area per image. By doing so, it was determined that the emitting area was always significantly smaller than the FE cathode surface area. Namely, the actual FE area would change from 5×10-3 % to 1.5 % of the total cathode area with the applied electric field increased. Finally and most importantly, it was shown that when I-E curves as measured in the experiment were normalized by the field-dependent emission area, the resulting j-E curves demonstrated a strong kink and significant deviation from Fowler-Nordheim (FN) law, and eventually saturated at a current density of ~100 mA/cm2 . This value was nearly identical for all (N)UNCD films measured in this study, regardless of the substrate.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 1395872
- Journal Information:
- ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, Vol. 9, Issue 38; ISSN 1944-8244
- Publisher:
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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