Confirmation of Transit Time-Limited Field Emission in Advanced Carbon Materials with a Fast Pattern Recognition Algorithm

An accurate estimation of the experimental field emission area remains a great challenge in vacuum electronics. The lack of convenient means, which can be used to measure this parameter, creates a critical knowledge gap, making it impossible to compare theory to experiment. In this work, a fast pattern recognition algorithm was developed to complement field emission microscopy, together creating a methodology to obtain and analyze electron emission micrographs in order to quantitatively estimate the field emission area. The algorithm is easy to use and made available to the community as freeware and therefore is described in detail. Three examples of DC emission are given to demonstrate the applicability of this algorithm to determine spatial distribution of emitters, calculate emission areas, and finally obtain experimental current density as a function of the electric field for two technologically important field emitter materials, namely, an ultra-nanocrystalline diamond and a carbon nanotube fiber. Unambiguous results, demonstrating the current density saturation and once again proving that conventional Fowler–Nordheim theory, its Murphy–Good extension, and the vacuum space charge effect fail to describe such behavior, are presented and discussed. We also show that the transit time-limited charge resupply captures the current density saturation behavior observed in experiments and provides good quantitative agreement with experimental data for all cases studied in this work.