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Band-to-Band Tunneling-Dominated Thermo-Enhanced Field Electron Emission from p‑Si/ZnO Nanoemitters
journal contribution
posted on 2018-06-04, 00:00 authored by Zhizhen Huang, Yifeng Huang, Ningsheng Xu, Jun Chen, Juncong She, Shaozhi DengThermo-enhancement
is an effective way to achieve high performance field electron emitters,
and enables the individually tuning on the emission current by temperature
and the electron energy by voltage. The field emission current from
metal or n-doped semiconductor emitter at a relatively lower temperature
(i.e., < 1000 K) is less temperature sensitive due to the weak
dependence of free electron density on temperature, while that from
p-doped semiconductor emitter is restricted by its limited free electron
density. Here, we developed full array of uniform individual p-Si/ZnO
nanoemitters and demonstrated the strong thermo-enhanced field emission.
The mechanism of forming uniform nanoemitters with well Si/ZnO mechanical
joint in the nanotemplates was elucidated. No current saturation was
observed in the thermo-enhanced field emission measurements. The emission
current density showed about ten-time enhancement (from 1.31 to 12.11
mA/cm2 at 60.6 MV/m) by increasing the temperature from
323 to 623 K. The distinctive performance did not agree with the interband
excitation mechanism but well-fit to the band-to-band tunneling model.
The strong thermo-enhancement was proposed to be benefit from the
increase of band-to-band tunneling probability at the surface portion
of the p-Si/ZnO nanojunction. This work provides promising cathode
for portable X-ray tubes/panel, ionization vacuum gauges and low energy
electron beam lithography, in where electron-dose control at a fixed
energy is needed.
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nanoemitteruniformelectron densityn-doped semiconductor emitterenergy electron beam lithographyperformance field electron emittersthermo-enhanced field emissionp-Sithermo-enhanced field emission measurementsband-to-band tunneling probabilityMVinterband excitation mechanismBand-to-Band Tunneling-Dominated Thermo-Enhanced Field Electron Emissionp-doped semiconductor emitterband-to-band tunneling model
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