Stable Field Emission from Single-Crystalline Zirconium Carbide Nanowires
Yimeng Wu,
Jie Tang,
Shuai Tang,
You-Hu Chen,
Ta-Wei Chiu,
Masaki Takeguchi,
Lu-Chang Qin
Affiliations
Yimeng Wu
Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0047, Ibaraki, Japan
Jie Tang
Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0047, Ibaraki, Japan
Shuai Tang
State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Display Material and Technology, School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
You-Hu Chen
Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0047, Ibaraki, Japan
Ta-Wei Chiu
Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0047, Ibaraki, Japan
Masaki Takeguchi
Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0047, Ibaraki, Japan
Lu-Chang Qin
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3255, USA
The oriented single-crystalline Zirconium Carbide (ZrC) nanowires were controllably synthesized on a graphite substrate by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) with optimized growth parameters involving Zirconium tetrachloride (ZrCl4), flow of methane (CH4), and growth temperature. The length of nanowires is above 10 µm while the diameter is smaller than 100 nm. A single ZrC nanowire was picked up and fixed on a tungsten tip for field emission measurement. After surface pretreatments, a sharpened and cleaned ZrC nanowire emitter showed a high emission current density of 1.1 × 1010 A m−2 at a low turn-on voltage of 440 V. The field emission is stable for 150 min with a fluctuation of 1.77%. This work provides an effective method for synthesizing and stabilizing single-crystalline ZrC nanowire emitters as an electron source for electron-beam applications.
