Dimensional effects on field emission properties of the body for single-walled carbon nanotube

In this letter, by use of the first-principles calculations, field emission properties of the body are investigated for a series of dimension-variational single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). We find that in the course of increasing tube diameter, at low emission currents, field emission properties worsen, chemical stability enhances and binding energy increases, which indicates that optimized field emitter could be achieved; while at high applied voltages, the highest emission current density may appear for the SWNT with some peculiar dimension. We predict that the body of the SWNT could behave as a peculiar field emitter with high threshold voltage and high current density. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.