Application of carbon nanotubes for field emission display

Carbon nanotubes have great features to be excellent electron emitters. They are among the best candidates to replace metal emitters in field emission displays.; In this work, carbon nanotubes have been synthesized by arc-discharge, catalytic decomposition of hydrocarbon and nano template method. Arc-discharge produces nanotubes with the highest quality. Impurity particles in the raw material can be removed by filtration or oxidation. A slurry procedure has been developed to make films of randomly orientated nanotubes.; Electron field emission of nanotubes made by three different methods has been measured and compared. Arc-produced nanotubes showed the best performance and stability. It is suggested that the defects of different tubes may account for their emission behavior.; Carbon nanotube based diode and triode field emission display prototypes were successfully fabricated and tested.; For the diode nanotube display prototype, row-column structure was used. Tests of the display prototype confirmed the emission stability and uniformity. Display pixels were well defined and switchable under a half-voltage “off pixel” scheme. With the available modern circuit board printing technology, the scale-up in display size is straightforward.; Great efforts have been put into the development of a triode nanotube display prototype. The design was based on that of the planar emitter triode structure for diamond film. Several key engineering problems such as patternable thick dielectric layer and gate gap control etc. were solved. The achieved emitter arrays showed good uniformity. Emission behavior with regarding to emitter size was studied. The effectiveness of the gate control was confirmed by I-V measurement and modulating test at 40 V pulse input to the gate electrode.