Carbon Nanotubes Decorated with Platinum Nanoparticles for Field-Emission Application

Vitaly Gurylev; Tzu-Kang Chin; Hung-Yin Tsai

doi:10.1021/acsomega.9b01478

Carbon Nanotubes Decorated with Platinum Nanoparticles for Field-Emission Application

ACS Omega. 2019 Sep 10;4(13):15428-15434. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.9b01478. eCollection 2019 Sep 24.

Authors

Vitaly Gurylev¹, Tzu-Kang Chin¹, Hung-Yin Tsai¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Power Mechanical Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan.

Abstract

In this work, a simple and scalable method was presented to decorate carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with platinum nanoparticles (Pt NPs) by atomic layer deposition (ALD) for field emission (FE) application. The size and distribution of NPs were precisely controlled by adjusting the number of ALD cycles. It was discovered that a higher cycle number of ALD resulted in continuously increased conductivity of the CNTs@Pt nanocomposite. It could be explained by not only the increased loading of Pt NPs but also by the gradually decreased presence of the PtO compound in NPs. As a result, a significant improvement in the FE characteristics of the cold cathode was observed because of the decoration of CNTs with metal NPs. The higher number of ALD cycles resulted in the gradual lowering of the turn-on electric field which reached a minimum value of ∼0.43 V/μm after 100 cycles of ALD.