Large-scale fabrication of ordered arrays of microcontainers and the restraint effect on growth of CuO nanowires

Technique has been developed to fabricate ordered arrays of microcontainers. We report that ordered microcontainer arrays of Cu can be fabricated on glass substrate by thin film deposition and self-assembly technology. In addition, CuO nanowires are found to grow only in the inner sides of microcontainers, which verifies the stress growth mechanism of CuO nanowires. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy study reveals that CuO nanowires grow along the [110] direction. Such structure may have potential application in micro-electron sources, which have the self-focused function

Screening effects on field emission from arrays of (5,5) carbon nanotubes: Quantum-mechanical simulation

The simulation of field electron emission from arrays of micrometer-long open-ended (5, 5) carbon nanotubes is performed in the framework of quantum theory of many electrons. It is found that the applied external field is strongly screened when the spacing distance is shorter than the length of the carbon nanotubes. The optimal spacing distance is two to three times of the nanotube length, slightly depending on the applied external fields. The electric screening can be described by a factor that is a exponential function of the ratio of the spacing distance to the length of the carbon nanotubes. For a given length, the field enhancement factor decreases sharply as the screening factor larger than 0.05. The simulation implies that the thickness of the array should be larger than a value but it does not help the emission much by increasing the thickness a great deal

Atomic decoration for improving the efficiency of field electron emission of carbon nanotubes

The field electron emission from the single-walled carbon nanotubes with their open ends terminated by -BH, -NH, and -O has been simulated. The apex-vacuum barrier and the emission current have been calculated. It has been found that -BH and -NH suppress the apex-vacuum barrier significantly and lead to higher emission current in contrast to the -O terminated structure in the same applied field. The calculated binding energy implies that the carbon nanotubes terminated with -BH and -NH are more stable than those saturated by oxygen atoms or by hydrogen atoms.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, LaTeX; content changed, typos corrected, references adde