2016/09/30 by Andreas Kyritsakis, Flyura Djurabekova · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advancements in Semiconductor Devices and Circuit Design #Atomic physics #Computational physics #Diamond and Carbon-based Materials Research #Electron #Engineering #Engineering physics #Field (mathematics) #Field electron emission #Materials science #Mathematics #Nanotechnology #Nuclear engineering #Nuclear physics #Physics #Semiconductor materials and devices #Thermal #Thermal emission #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.commatsci.2016.11.010
published as Computational Materials Science (128), pp. 15 - 21, (2017)
openalex publication_date 2016/11/19 · arxiv created 2016/11/21 · arxiv updated 2016/11/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Electron emission from nanometric size emitters becomes of increasing interest due to its involvement to sharp electron sources, vacuum breakdown phenomena and various other vacuum nanoelectronics applications. The most commonly used theoretical tools for the calculation of electron emission are still nowadays the Fowler-Nordheim and the Richardson-Laue-Dushman equations although it has been shown since the 1990's that they are inadequate for nanometrically sharp emitters or in the intermediate thermal-field regime. In this paper we develop a computational method for the calculation of emission currents and Nottingham heat, which automatically distinguishes among different emission regimes, and implements the appropriate calculation method for each. Our method covers all electron emission regimes (thermal, field and intermediate), aiming to maximize the calculation accuracy while minimizing the computational time. As an example, we implemented it in atomistic simulations of the thermal evolution of Cu nanotips under strong electric fields and found that the predicted behaviour of such nanotips by the developed technique differs significantly from estimations obtained based on the Fowler-Nordheim equation. Finally, we show that our tool can be also successfully applied in the analysis of experimental I-V data.