Study of carbon nanotube pillar arrays' edge effect on field emission characteristics

Effect of carbon nanotube pillar arrays' edge effect on field emission characteristics is first studied. The ratio of field emission current density at 5.733V/μm is about 55: 6.5: 1 which is nearly proportional to the edge ratio (50:5:1) for small, middle, and large sizes of CNTs' arrays. Besides, ultra low turn-on field (~1.4 V/μm), well emission image uniformity and stability of about ±6.52 % at 650V were also achieved.