Fabrication and Performance Testing of Composite Molybdenum: "Resinpal 2301" Field Emission Emitters

Abstract

Over the past few decades, epoxy resins have shown several advantages as coating materials for field emission electron sources; this includes lowering the operation applied voltages and the threshold voltage required to start the electron emission process. This study illustrates the results of using the Resinpal 2301 epoxy resin as a coating material for field emission emitters. The results include the ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy analysis to obtain an average value for the local work function and ionization energy for the cured coating layer. The samples were checked using scanning electron microscopy before and after being coated with the cured epoxy resin. Moreover, the field emission microscopy characteristics of both uncoated molybdenum and composite molybdenum-epoxy samples are presented in the form of a comprehensive comparison. The study shows promising results in enhancing the field emission characteristics with the application of the coating material. Notably, there was a significant reduction in the threshold voltage. The emission current values from coated samples were found to be at least ~11 times higher than those from uncoated samples.