THE FIELD EMISSION ELECTRON SOURCE IN BIPOLAR POWER SUPPLY

摘要

Despite the fantastic progress, made in the development of methods and technologies of different nanostructures production (creation) for the last 5-6 years, the future prospects of their application in vacuum devices such as unheated cathodes are still being unclear. The problems of emission current fluctuation, stability and maintainability of emitters' functioning in the technical vacuum (e. g., after spark discharge) are not solved so far, as well as the task of receiving of stably high (during the long period of time) field-emission currents, etc. The main problem lies in the limited number of really working emission centers, which is several orders less, than number of potentially created nanostructural elements. At present there is a significant increase in experimental research (patents) devoted to emitter formation in situ. The works, aimed at creation of field emission nano- and microstructures by natural means (at least, partly), in the course of experiment (immediately in the device), are of great interest. Investigation of conditions, enabling direct relation between number of emission points, working simultaneously, and the field itself (e. g. as in case of liquid metal tips [1]) or field emission current, will result in significant stabilization of emission characteristics, long lifetime, tolerance to vacuum conditions, etc.