Coulomb blockade of field emission from nanoscale conductors

Abstract

Theoretical description of the field emission of electrons from nanoscale objects weakly coupled to the cathode is presented. It is shown that the field- emission current increases in a step-like fashion due to single-electron charging which leads to abrupt changes of the effective electric field responsible for the field emission. A detailed consideration of the current-voltage characteristics is carried out for a nanocluster modelled by a metallic spherical particle in the close vicinity of the cathode and for a cylindrical silicon nanowire grown on the cathode surface.

References in corpus (3)

• Shuttle Mechanism for Charge Transfer in Coulomb Blockade Nanostructures
• A nanomechanical resonator shuttling single electrons at radio frequencies
• Periodic Field Emission from an Isolated Nano-Scale Electron Island

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Coulomb blockade and quantum confinement in field electron emission from heterostructured nanotips
• Coulomb blockade in field electron emission from carbon nanotubes
• Nanoclusters and nanoscale voids as possible sources of increasing dark current in high-gradient vacuum breakdown
• Charged-particle oscillation in DC voltage biased plane-parallel conductors