Study on surface-conducted field emission cathode with ZnO nanowires

Surface-conducted field emission cathode with ZnO nanowires (ZnO-SCFE) has been successfully fabricated on the glass substrate by thermal evaporation and screen printing and its field emission (FE) characteristics were also investigated.SEM shows that the diameters of aligned and quasi-perpendicular ZnO nanowires synthesized on the glass substrate at reaction temperature of 550°C for 30min under a flow rate of 60mL/min of Ar and 1mL/min of O2 were scattered in a range of 80-200nm and the length up to 7μm.FE indicates that its turn-on voltage was approximately 70V and electron-emission efficiency was around 26.2% which was more higher than that of surface-conducted emission display (SED) when the gate and anode voltage was 96V and 2000V, respectively, at the anode-cathode spacing of 500μm.In addition, the emission current of ZnO-SCFE cathode was about 135μA after aging for 80min.Moreover, it exhibited a stability without a great degradation, which indicates the ZnO-SCFE cathode has a stable and efficient FE properties.