Thermal-assisted field emission from carbon nanotube cathode

Carbon nanotube is a promising electron source due to its excellent field emission performance. However, most of the field emission experiments for CNTs were performed at a fixed temperature. In this work, a thermal-assisted field emission of screen printed carbon nanotube cathode was investigated. It is found that the field emission properties of the CNTs cathode, such as turn-on field and the field emission current density, were largely related to the temperature of the cathode. The decrement of work function was the main reason for the variation in the field emission properties.