Investigation of the temperature dependence of the field emission current of polycrystalline diamond films

This letter reports on the measurement of the field emission current dependence of doped polycrystalline diamond (PCD) films on temperature. The motivation for this type of measurement was to assess the thermal stability of PCD field emitters and gain some insight into a possible emission mechanism. Between room temperature and 300 degrees C, for a fixed electric field, the emission current from B doped films was found to remain constant. Heavily doped nitrogen him were also examined and the emission current was found to increase exponentially with an activation energy of 0.16 eV. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.