Field Electron Emission Characteristics of Tungsten–Polyethylene Composite Material As a Source of Electron Emission

Abstract: This work provides an experimental study on the effects of polyethylene coating on the field electron emission characteristics of clean (uncoated) tungsten tips. Several tungsten tips, with different apex radii, have been prepared, coated with different thicknesses of polyethylene layers and then examined using a standard field electron emission microscope. Various field electron emission characteristics have been measured under high-vacuum conditions. These include current-voltage characteristics, Fowler-Nordheim plots, scanning electron micrographs and spatial current distributions (electron-emission images). Based on this work, it is proved that coating tungsten tips with polyethylene layers has caused dramatic improvements on the tip emission properties. In particular, coating the tips improves the current-voltage characteristics, which is reflected in lowering the extraction voltage, getting more stable emission currents, expressing the current-voltage characteristics using Fowler-Nordheim plots and finally, the spatial distributions of the emitted electrons for the coated tips are more stable and uniform. Keywords: Field electron emitter, Polyethylene dielectric layer, Composite emitter, Field electron microscope, Scanning electron microscope.