Stable Field Emission from Single-Crystalline Zirconium Carbide Nanowires

Yimeng Wu; Jie Tang; Shuai Tang; You-Hu Chen; Ta-Wei Chiu; Masaki Takeguchi; Lu-Chang Qin

doi:10.3390/nano14191567

Stable Field Emission from Single-Crystalline Zirconium Carbide Nanowires

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2024 Sep 27;14(19):1567. doi: 10.3390/nano14191567.

Authors

Yimeng Wu^{1

2}, Jie Tang^{1

2}, Shuai Tang³, You-Hu Chen¹, Ta-Wei Chiu^{1

2}, Masaki Takeguchi¹, Lu-Chang Qin⁴

Affiliations

¹ Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0047, Ibaraki, Japan.
² Graduate School of Pure and Applied Science, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba 305-8577, Ibaraki, Japan.
³ State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Display Material and Technology, School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3255, USA.

Abstract

The <100> oriented single-crystalline Zirconium Carbide (ZrC) nanowires were controllably synthesized on a graphite substrate by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) with optimized growth parameters involving Zirconium tetrachloride (ZrCl₄), flow of methane (CH₄), and growth temperature. The length of nanowires is above 10 µm while the diameter is smaller than 100 nm. A single ZrC nanowire was picked up and fixed on a tungsten tip for field emission measurement. After surface pretreatments, a sharpened and cleaned ZrC nanowire emitter showed a high emission current density of 1.1 × 10¹⁰ A m^-2 at a low turn-on voltage of 440 V. The field emission is stable for 150 min with a fluctuation of 1.77%. This work provides an effective method for synthesizing and stabilizing single-crystalline ZrC nanowire emitters as an electron source for electron-beam applications.

Keywords: chemical vapor deposition; electric field emission; nanowire; zirconium carbide.

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials (GREEN). We also wish to thank the support for analysis from the NIMS Transmission Electron Microscopy Unit and “Advanced Research Infrastructure for Materials and Nanotechnology in Japan (ARIM)” of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT).