Investigation on the field emission behaviour of CNT-based emitter systems

We have investigated the probable origin of instable emission behaviour for various types of cold emitters based on CVD carbon layers, CNT and Al₂O₃/ITO glass. Of them, CNT-based cold emitters have been accepted to be most appropriate for the promising applications such as displays, flat lamps, signage boards and back-light unit (BLU) including local dimming function. Although planar field emission (FE) lamp system of triode configuration has been considered to be the 1^st real product for the practical application based on CNT cold emitters due to the easy and simple fabrication procedure, the vacuum-packaged CNT FE-Lamp systems have clearly demonstrated much poor emission behaviour such as a short and long-term degradation of emission current even for the use of best quality CNTs. In this work, we have tried to trace down probable key origin for the instable emission behavior of CNT cold emitters as well as planar cold cathode.