Cold-cathode emitter based on a metal-diamond tunneling junction

Recently Geis fabricated a composite cold cathode emitter made of diamond doped by substitutional nitrogen on a roughened metallic substrate, which is characterized by high field emission currents at very low power. Using an internal field emission mechanism through the Schottky barrier at the metal diamond interfaces to populate the conduction band of diamond, we have developed a quantitative theory to describe the operation of such a device. The calculated I-V characteristics are in good agreement with the experimental results of Geis, et al.