Growth of flexible N-doped SiC quasialigned nanoarrays and their field emission properties

Abstract

In the present work, we report the growth of flexible SiC quasialigned nanoarrays with N dopants on carbon fabric substrate via the catalyst-assisted pyrolysis of a polymeric precursor. The resultant products are systematically characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). The as-synthesized SiC nanowires are single-crystalline and grow along the [111] direction with a uniform spatial distribution of N dopants. The effect of the distance between the SiC array and the anode on the Field emission (FE) properties was investigated. FE measurements show that these N-doped SiC nanoarrays could be an excellent candidate for field emitters with very low turn-on fields of 1.90–2.65 V μm⁻¹ and threshold fields of 2.53–3.51 V μm⁻¹, respectively, which can be mainly attributed to the decrease of work function induced by the N dopants.