Preparation, superior field emission properties and first principles calculation of electronic structure of SiC nanowire arrays on Si substrate

Highlights: • Oriented SiC nanowire arrays have been successfully prepared on Si substrate. • As a promising emitter, the products exhibits superior field emission performances. • A reasonable synergistic electronic transmission mechanism was discussed. It is a crucial item to develop an available, efficient and stable cathode material for the application of flat-panel display, vacuum micro-electronic device, electron source and related area/equipment. In this work, oriented single-crystalline SiC nanowires (SiCNW) arrays were successfully fabricated onto the Si (100) substrate according to an easy Ni-catalyst-assisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. The systematical characterization results suggested that product growth was modulated via the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism. As the promising member in the candidate cathodes, SiCNW arrays with superior current emission stability (~ ± 6.1%) displayed decreased turn-on field (1.26 V/μm) along with threshold field (1.83 V/μm) at the optimal spacing between anode and cathode (about 500 μm), suggesting their great application potential as field emitters in the future. The positive effect of the stacking faults on the electronic structure and field emission (FE) properties were investigated through first principles calculation using Vienna ab initio Simulation package (VASP) of density functional theory (DFT). Furthermore, a reasonable synergetic electronic transmission mechanism based on peculiar morphology and electronic band structure was proposed to explain the superior field emission performances.