21st Century Planar Field Emission Theory and its Role in Vacuum Breakdown Science
Abstract
For explaining electrical breakdown, field electron emission (FE) is a mechanism of interest. In the period 2006 to 2010 there were significant developments in basic FE theory, but these have not yet fully entered general thinking in technological FE areas, which are often still based on 1960s thinking or (in some contexts) 1920s thinking about FE theory. This paper outlines the history of FE theory and provides an overview of modern developments and of some related topics, in so far as these affect the interpretation of experiments and the explanation of physical phenomena. The paper concentrates on principles, with references given where details can be found. Some suggestions are made about moving to the use of "21st-Century" FE theory. In addition, an error in Feynman's treatment of the electrostatics of pointed conductors is displayed, and it is found that Zener tunneling is implausible as a primary cause of vacuum breakdown from a CuO overlayer.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.08801,
title = {21st Century Planar Field Emission Theory and its Role in Vacuum Breakdown Science},
author = {Richard G. Forbes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.08801},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
8 pages, 1 figure. Originally presented at the 29th International Symposium on Discharges and Electrical Insulation in Vacuum (hosted virtually from Padova, September 2021). This version (v2) corrects typographic errors (including two in an equation) in the original arXiv verwion and the published version