Field emission property characterization of individual carbon nanotubes through nanorobotic manipulations and its applications

Field emission properties of individual multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNT) have been investigated and applied to several nano devices. Field emission current changes with the distance between the tip of a carbon nanotube (CNT) emitter and a counterpart anode, which can be applied as the principle for an approaching sensor to detect nanometer scale distance by the observation of field emission current in real time. Higher field emission current in microampere-scale from a CNT emitter has been shown strong enough for performing electron-beam-induced deposition (EBID) without obvious degradation of emitters. EBID with CNT emitters can provide much higher specific deposition rate, potentially better productivity due to the possibility to be used in parallel, and richer metallic composition as introducing organometallic precursors such as W(CO)₆ as presented In this work. Energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) analysis on deposits from W(CO)₆ shows that the mass of tungsten reaches up to over 80% among the compositions.