Evidence of universal inverse-third power law for the shielding-induced fractional decrease in apex field enhancement...

Numerical simulations are important when assessing the many characteristics of field emission related phenomena. In small simulation domains, the electrostatic effect from the boundaries is known to influence the calculated apex field enhancement factor (FEF) of the emitter, but no established dependence has been reported at present. In this work, we report the dependence of the lateral size, L, and the height, H, of the simulation domain on the apex-FEF of a single conducting ellipsoidal emitter. Firstly, we analyze the error, ε, in the calculation of the apex-FEF as a function of H and L. Importantly, our results show that the effects of H and L on ε are scale invariant, allowing one to predict ε for ratios L/h and H/h, where h is the height of the emitter. Next, we analyze the fractional change of the apex-FEF, δ, from a single emitter, [Formula: see text], and a pair, [Formula: see text]. We show that small relative errors in [Formula: see text] (i.e. [Formula: see text]), due to the finite domain size, are sufficient to alter the functional dependence [Formula: see text], where c is the distance from the emitters in the pair. We show that [Formula: see text] obeys a recently proposed power law decay (Forbes 2016 J. Appl. Phys. 120 054302), at sufficiently large distances in the limit of infinite domain size ([Formula: see text], say), which is not observed when using a long time established exponential decay (Bonard et al 2001 Adv. Mater. 13 184) or a more sophisticated fitting formula proposed recently by Harris et al (2015 AIP Adv. 5 087182). We show that the inverse-third power law functional dependence is respected for various systems like infinity arrays and small clusters of emitters with different shapes. Thus, [Formula: see text], with m  =  3, is suggested to be a universal signature of the charge-blunting effect in small clusters or arrays, at sufficient large distances between emitters with any shape. These results improve the physical understanding of the field electron emission theory to accurately characterize emitters in small clusters or arrays.