Field-emission Properties of Ni-C Nanocomposite Films

Abstract

Field-emission properties of Ni-C nanocomposite thin films were experimentally studied. The films were deposited at Si substrates using CVD technique with a metalloorganic precursor and were composed by nm-scale grains of metallic Ni bounded with a carbonic weakly-conducting matrix. In the samples with lower effective thickness, the Ni particles were separated from each other. Such films showed capability of facilitated emission with threshold field values as low as a few V/m. Thicker coating samples, with metallic particle merged in a conductive layer, required annealing at 470-600 С in vacuum to produce low-field emission current. The observed emission behavior agrees with the previously proposed model considering low-field emission from nanostructured carbonic materials as a multi-stage process involving generation of hot electrons at interface boundaries.

Low-Field Electron Emission Capability of Thin Films on Flat Silicon Substrates: Experiments with Mo and General Model for Refractory Metals and Carbon

“…This is comparable with threshold field values for the best samples tested in the present work, and the emission, observed in those experiments, could have been caused, at least partially, by the direct action of the applied field, not by the feeding current. LMF emission capability has also been reported for composite metal/carbon films, e.g., in our previous paper [88]. However, the LMF emissivity phenomenon is best studied for purely carbon ENH materials and films.…”

General Experimental Method of Research of Anisotropy of Conductive Materials

“…The study of the anisotropy of various conductive samples was carried out according to the method developed by us for studying the electrophysical properties of materials and products from nanostructured composites [29][30][31][32][33].…”