Field Emission from Zinc Oxide Nanobelts

Abstract

We report here, the in-situ field emission (FE) property measurement on the individual ZnO nanobelts inside a high resolution transmission electron microscope (TEM) using a special scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)-TEM system. The field emission properties were found to be size scale dependent. It was found that the threshold voltage decreases and the field enhancement factor increases with the decrease in the diameter of the tip of the nanobelt and increase in the sharpness of the tip. The field emission parameter was estimated following the Fowler-Nordheim (F-N) theory. The ZnO nanobelt with the sharp agave like tip structure (d = 10 nm) showed the highest value of the field enhancement factor, β ≈ 4562, and a high field emission current of ~ 502 µA.