ISSN:
1089-7550
Source:
AIP Digital Archive
Topics:
Physics
Notes:
The layer-by-layer hydrogen plasma treatment method, alternatively repeating the process of nanometer thickness film deposition and hydrogen plasma chemical annealing, was applied to fabricate amorphous carbon (a-C) films. It was shown that hydrogen plasma treatment reduced the size of sp2 clusters and resulted in the increase of the optical band gap. Consequently, a stable vacuum electron emission with a low threshold field was achieved from layer-by-layer hydrogen plasma annealed a-C films compared with that from conventionally deposited samples. The threshold electric field was as low as 2 V/μm. The improvement of field emission characteristics could be attributed to the large field enhancement effect due to the inhomogeneous distribution of nanometer scale sp2 clusters. © 2002 American Institute of Physics.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1464211
