Influence of Fe nanoparticles diameters on the structure and electron emission studies of carbon nanotubes and multilayer graphene

In this paper we report the effect of Fe film thickness on the growth, structure and electron emission characteristics of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and multilayer graphene deposited on Si substrate. It is observed that the number of graphitic shells in carbon nanostructures (CNs) varies with the thickness of the catalyst depending on the average size of nanoparticles. Further, the Fe nanoparticles do not catalyze beyond a particular size of nanoclusters leading to the formation of multilayer graphene structure, instead of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). It is observed that the crystallinity of CNs enhances upon increasing the catalyst thickness. Multilayer graphene structures show improved crystallinity in comparison to CNTs as graphitic to defect mode intensity ratio (ID/IG) decreases from 1.2 to 0.8. However, I2D/IG value for multilayer graphene is found to be 1.1 confirming the presence of at least 10 layers of graphene in these samples. CNTs with smaller diameter show better electron emission properties with enhancement factor (γC = 2.8 × 103) in comparison to multilayer graphene structure (γC = 1.5 × 103). The better emission characteristics in CNTs are explained due to combination of electrons from edges as well as centers in comparison to the multilayer graphene.