Electron emission from nanometric size emitters becomes of increasinginterest due to its involvement to sharp electron sources, vacuum breakdownphenomena and various other vacuum nanoelectronics applications. The mostcommonly used theoretical tools for the calculation of electron emission arestill nowadays the Fowler-Nordheim and the Richardson-Laue-Dushman equationsalthough it has been shown since the 1990's that they are inadequate fornanometrically sharp emitters or in the intermediate thermal-field regime. Inthis paper we develop a computational method for the calculation of emissioncurrents and Nottingham heat, which automatically distinguishes among differentemission regimes, and implements the appropriate calculation method for each.Our method covers all electron emission regimes (thermal, field andintermediate), aiming to maximize the calculation accuracy while minimizing thecomputational time. As an example, we implemented it in atomistic simulationsof the thermal evolution of Cu nanotips under strong electric fields and foundthat the predicted behaviour of such nanotips by the developed techniquediffers significantly from estimations obtained based on the Fowler-Nordheimequation. Finally, we show that our tool can be also successfully applied inthe analysis of experimental I-V data.
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