No-catalyst growth of vertically-aligned AlN nanocone field electron emitter arrays with high emission performance at low temperature

The AlN nanostructures with a wide band-gap of 6.28 eV are considered as ideal cold cathode materials because of their low electron-affinity. Many methods have been devoted to fabricating AlN nanostructures, but high growth temperature over 800°C and the use of the catalysts in most methods limit their practical application and result in their poor field-emission behaviours in uniformity. This paper reports that without any catalysts, a simple chemical vapour deposition method is used to synthesize aligned AlN nanocone arrays at 550°C on silicon substrate or indium tin oxide glass. Field emission measurements show that these nanocones prepared at low temperature have an average turn-on field of 6 V/μm and a threshold field of 11.7 V/μm as well as stable emission behaviours at high field, which suggests that they have promising applications in field emission area.