Influence of arrangement and matrix number on the field emission from conductive nanowire array

Abstract

In order to further study the influence of the arrangement and matrix number of the conductive nanowires array on the field emission from the array, the more practical conductive hexagonal and square nanowire arrays were simulated with the mirror image floating sphere model in this paper. From the calculation results, the field enhancement factor of conductive nanowire array was expressed as the following expression:β=h/ρ(1/1+W)+1/2(1/1+W)2+3, in which h is the height of conductive nanowire, ρ is the radius and W is a function of the independent variable R, R is the interwire distance. All calculated results indicated that the arrangement of conductive nanowires array has less influence on the field emission, while the interwire distance critically affects the field emission. As RR0, the field enhancement factor decreases rapidly with R. When R>R0, the enhancement factor hardly changes, where R0 is the optimized interwire distance. The performance of field emission from conductive nanowire array hardly changes with the matrix number of the array, which only influences on the gradient curve of the enhancement factor. R0 would decrease to some extent with the increasing of the matrix number.