Can we reliably estimate the emission field and field enhancement factor of carbon nanotube film field emitters?

摘要

It is common practice in the literature to reduce the field emission properties of film field emitters to a few parameters to make possible a comparison between different samples. In particular, the macroscopic field needed to extract a given current density and the field enhancement factor are often used. The purpose of this contribution is to attract attention to the fact that such comparisons have to be done with utmost care, as the values of these parameters depend on the experimental configuration, and especially on the inter-electrode distance, used for the measurements. Current and future solutions are considered and discussed.