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Electrochemical Etching and Characterization of Sharp Field Emission Points for Electron Impact Ionization
Published on: July 12, 2016
Effect of tip geometry on photo-electron-emission from nanostructures
Ranganath Teki1, Toh-Ming Lu, Nikhil Koratkar
1Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th St., Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.
Abstract:
We show in this paper the strong effect of tip geometry on the photo-electron-emission behavior of nanostructured surfaces. To study the effect of tip geometry we compared the photo-emissivity of Ru and Pt nanorods with pyramidal shaped tips to that of carbon nanorods that display flat top (planar) tips. Flat top architectures gave no significant increase in the emission current, while nanostructures with pyramidal shaped tips showed 3-4 fold increase in photo-emission compared to a thin film of the same material. Pyramidal tip geometries increase the effective surface area that is exposed to the incident photon-flux thereby enhancing the photon-collection probability of the system. Such nano-structured surfaces show promise in a variety of device applications such as photo-detectors, photon counters and photo-multiplier tubes.

