Electron field emission from diamond-coated carbon foam

This article is a continuation of a previous work [Diamond & Relat. Mater. 13 (2004) 2113] on the observation of electron field emission patterns from B-doped diamond films, in which a preliminary result of experiment using carbon sponge (carbon foam) as a material for the emission source was presented. In the present work, the carbon foam was first soaked in nanodiamond powder-suspended water overnight, and microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition was done to locally deposit diamond particles and films on the carbon foam. It was found that at an applied electric field of 6 V/μm, the emission current from the diamond-coated carbon foam was 7.6 mA/cm2, which was more than one order of magnitude higher than that from a bare carbon foam.