Field electron emssion from graphite fiber [emssion read emission]

Summary form only given. Usually, carbon wire can not be used for obtaining remarkable field electron emission because the difficulty of sharpening its tip to a sufficient small radius of curvature to fit the electrical field. However, after a proper treatment on a graphite fiber, a large number of small fragments of graphite are formed on the tip of the graphite fiber. Observed by a SEM, these fragments are spheres and flakes with the size around 50nm. In this case, each of these spheres and flakes can be an emission center in a field emission and some detectable emission and some detectable emission current can be obtained with rather low applied voltage. Because there are a large number of fragments on the tip of a single graphite fiber, the total emission current from the tip would be very large. Experimental results show that a single graphite fiber of 20μm diameter near 0.2mA emission current can be obtained with 4kV applied voltage and the stability have been measured to be less than 10%. This would be the best achievement in the field of electron emission up to date. We expect that this achievement can be used in FE display or other display devices manufacturing near future.