Three-fold Constructive Perturbation for Significant Enhancement in Field Emission from Nickel Oxide Nano-Thorn

TL;DR

This paper reports a significant enhancement in field emission from nickel oxide nanostructures, achieved through geometric and surface micro-structural modifications, resulting in ultra-low threshold fields and high field enhancement.

Contribution

The study introduces a three-fold constructive perturbation approach to significantly improve field emission in nickel oxide nano-thorn structures, with simple fabrication methods and ultrafine needle-like features.

Findings

Field emission threshold as low as 3 V/mm

Field enhancement factor around 5 million

Three orders of magnitude improvement in FE performance

Abstract

A power efficient and stable field emission (FE) has been reported here from Nickel Oxide nanostructures. Modification in device geometry and surface micro- (nano-) structure has been found helpful in addressing the bottlenecks in achieving an efficient FE . In terms of threshold and turn on fields, three orders of magnitude better electron FE has been observed in the nickel oxide nanopetals (NiO-NPs) fabricated using simple hydrothermal technique. Uniform and vertically aligned NiO-NPs structures, grown on very flat conducting surface (FTO coated glass), show sharp needles like structures on the top edges of the flakes. These ultrafine structures play the main role in field emission to start at such a low turn on fields. The FE data (J-E plot) has been fitted with Fowler-Nordheim (FN) equation to estimate threshold field value and field enhancement factor which are found to be 3 V/mm and $\sim$ 5 $\times$ 10$^6$ respectively.