Resonant field emission from noble-metal/graphene heterostructures

Abstract

Field emission from metals underpinned early vacuum-tube technology, and recent nanoscale engineering made field-emission devices compatible with modern silicon platforms. However, the limited tunability of electron transport in metals has restricted their applicability. Here, we show that noble metals coated with graphene exhibit clean non-monotonic $I-V$ characteristics arising from resonant tunneling through graphene's electronic states, enabled by graphene's atomic thinness and weak electronic hybridization with noble metals. Our approach combines ab-initio interface parameters with exact solutions of the Schrödinger equation for electron transmission across the interface. We analyze two experimentally relevant geometries: a vertical configuration with a flat suspended emitter and a coplanar configuration with sharp electrodes allowing for strong field enhancement and gating. These results establish a practical route to tunable electron transport in metal heterostructures, positioning them as competitive components for air-channel field-emission nanoelectronics.

to appear in Nano Letters: 7 pages + references and supporting materials = 18 pages in total, including 4 main figures and 5 supplementary figures

References in corpus (6)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• Doping graphene with metal contacts
• Dirac Cones and Minigaps for Graphene on Ir(111)
• The structure and properties of graphene supported on gold nanoparticles
• Universal characteristics of resonant-tunneling field emission from nanostructured surfaces
• Tailoring 10 nm Scale Suspended Graphene Junctions and Quantum Dots