Dramatic enhancement of the emission current density from carbon nanotube based nanosize tips with extremely low onset fields.

Hazra, Kiran Shankar; Rai, Padmnabh; Mohapatra, Dipti Ranjan; Kulshrestha, Neha; Bajpai, Reeti; Roy, Soumyendu; Misra, D S · ACS Nano · 2009

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Nanostructures based on multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) are fabricated using plasma of the mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen gases. The plasma-sharpened tips of nanotubes contain only a few tubes at the apex of the structure and lead to the dramatic enhancement in the emission current density by a factor >10(6) with the onset field as low as 0.16 V/microm. We propose that the nature of the tunneling barrier changes significantly for a nanosize tip at very high local electric field and may lead to the saturation in the emission current density.