Field emission energy spectra fine structure for metallic cathodes coated by dielectric or semiconductor films

Abstract

Presented item deals with investigations of energy spectra fine structure behavior during field emission process for thin film hetero-structures. It is known that fine structures appear in field emission energy spectra for metallic cathodes covered by dielectric or semiconductor thin films, but there is no detailed investigation of rules of such phenomenon. This work presents some results of correlation attempt between transfer matrix method of calculation field emission energy spectrum for metallic cathodes covered by thin film and experimental data obtained for such objects. Tungsten-silicon, tungsten-carbon and tungsten-zirconia hetero-structure cathodes are under consideration. The summary of experimental data of some previous papers is under discussion in terms of computation methods suggested earlier and developed by authors for metallic tip field emission process. It is also discovered from computation that under some conditions of film width and emission voltage it is technically possible to separate particular peak with very thin half-width of energy spectrum while brightness is high. Good correlation between computation and experimental results of field emission process for thin film hetero-structure is obtained.