English

Analytical treatment of cold field electron emission from a nanowall emitter

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2012-09-05 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

This paper presents an elementary, approximate analytical treatment of cold field electron emission (CFE) from a classical nanowall. A simple model is used to bring out some of the basic physics of a class of field emitter where quantum confinement effects exist transverse to the emitting direction. A high-level methodology is presented for developing CFE equations more general than the usual Fowler-Nordheim-type (FN-type) equations, and is applied to the classical nanowall. If the nanowall is sufficiently thin, then significant transverse-energy quantization effects occur, and affect the overall form of theoretical CFE equations; also, the tunnelling barrier shape exhibits "fall-off" in the local field value with distance from the surface. A conformal transformation technique is used to derive an analytical expression for the on-axis tunnelling probability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1002.3947,
  title  = {Analytical treatment of cold field electron emission from a nanowall emitter},
  author = {Xizhou Qin and Weiliang Wang and Ningsheng Xu and Zhibing Li and Richard G. Forbes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.3947},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

48 pages, 4 figures