title: Dramatic enhancement of the emission current density from carbon nanotube based nanosize tips with extremely low onset fields.
abstract: Nanostructures based on multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) are fabricated using plasma of the mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen gases. The plasma-sharpened tips of nanotubes contain only a few tubes at the apex of the structure and lead to the dramatic enhancement in the emission current density by a factor >10(6) with the onset field as low as 0.16 V/microm. We propose that the nature of the tunneling barrier changes significantly for a nanosize tip at very high local electric field and may lead to the saturation in the emission current density.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai-400 076, India.
authors.forename: Kiran Shankar
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Hazra
authors.forename: Padmnabh
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rai
authors.forename: Dipti Ranjan
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Mohapatra
authors.forename: Neha
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kulshrestha
authors.forename: Reeti
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bajpai
authors.forename: Soumyendu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Roy
authors.forename: D S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Misra