Easy synthesis of amorphous graphene and related hybrids for cold cathode application

Abstract

Owing to enormous growing interest regarding the graphene based field emission display device, we have reported a very simple route to synthesis amorphous graphene (a-Gs) by ultra-sonication assisted unzipping of low-temperature synthesized amorphous carbon nanotubes. Also different hybrid systems have been developed by spinning assisted coating of the as prepared a-Gs on plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposited carbon nanoparticles or chemically synthesized vertically aligned silicon nanowires in order to develop hybrid cold cathode materials. Also the as synthesized a-Gs have been deposited in carbon cloth substrate by electrophoretic deposition process and thus making it usable as flexible field emitter. It has been seen that all the, pure and hybrid samples give good field emission characteristics and the best result comes from the a-Gs deposited on carbon cloth. The turn field in this case becomes as low as 0.52V/μm thus comparable or even better than the existing graphene based materials. So there should be a possibility of substituting some graphene based devices with this a-Gs having further advantage of its simple synthesis procedure as well as gram level higher yield.