Improvement of electron emission characteristics of porous silicon emitter by using cathode reduction and electrochemical oxidation

Highlights: • An electron emitter based on porous silicon having the strong application potential was prepared in the studying. • A new simple and convenient post-treat technique was proposed to improve the electron emission properties of the PS emitter. • It demonstrated that the improving of the PS morphology and the oxygen distribution is very important to the PS emitter. - Abstract: A new simple and convenient post-treat technique combined the cathode reduction (CR) and electrochemical oxidation (ECO) was proposed to improve the electron emission properties of the surface-emitting cold cathodes based on the porous silicon (PS). It is demonstrated here that by introducing this new technique combined CR and ECO, the emission properties of the diode have been significantly improved than those as-prepared samples. The experimental results showed that the emission current densities and efficiencies of sample treated by CR were 62 μA/cm² and 12.10‰, respectively, nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher than those of as-prepared sample. Furthermore, the CR-treated PS emitter shows higher repeatability and stability compared with the as-prepared PS emitter. The scanning electron microscope (SEM), atomic force microscope (AFM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), furier transformed infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy results indicated that the improved mechanism is mainly due to the passivation of the PS, which not only improve the PS morphology by the passivation of the H⁺ but also improve the uniformity of the oxygen content distribution in the whole PS layer. Therefore, the method combined the CR treatment and ECO is expected to be a valuable technique to enhance the electron emission characteristics of the PS emitter.