Fabrication and characterization of high current field emitters with silicon ball-tip pins

This paper introduces a novel design of high current field emitters based on unique pin structures with a ball shaped tip. Our ball-tip pins provide relatively large surface area at the tip and increase the field enhancement factor regardless of dimension of the pin base. The ball-tip pins turn out to produce higher field emission current than that from the generic sharp-tip pins due to the significantly increased field emission sites at the ball-tip surface.