摘要:

Abstract An important advancement towards the realization of miniaturized and fully integrated vacuum electronic devices will be the development of on-chip integrated electron sources with stable and reproducible performances. Here, the fabrication of high-performance on-chip thermionic electron micro-emitter arrays is demonstrated by exploiting suspended super-aligned carbon nanotube films as thermionic filaments. For single micro-emitter, an electron emission current up to ≈20 µA and density as high as ≈1.33 A cm−2 are obtained at a low-driven voltage of 3.9 V. The turn-on/off time of a single micro-emitter is measured to be less than 1 µs. Particularly, stable (±1.2% emission current fluctuation for 30 min) and reproducible (±0.2% driven voltage variation over 27 cycles) electron emission have been experimentally observed under a low vacuum of ≈5 × 10−4 Pa. Even under a rough vacuum of ≈10−1 Pa, an impressive reproducibility (±2% driven voltage variation over 20 cycles) is obtained. Moreover, emission performances of micro-emitter arrays are found to exhibit good uniformity. The outstanding stability, reproducibility, and uniformity of the thermionic electron micro-emitter arrays imply their promising applications as on-chip integrated electron sources.

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