Growth and applications of nanotube films

We have presented a method to produce carbon nanotube films by microwave plasma enhanced CVD deposition and have characterised their electron field emission by different techniques. First devices made out of these films reveal that even though the emission is understood in terms of the underlying physics more effort has to be put in the technology to get uniform emitting films, with a narrow field enhancement factor distribution and a controlled internal resistor being stable in time. By using a hot filament reactor we were able to uniformly cover 4" wafers with nanotubes. Structured and patterned nanotube films have been grown and characterised with respect to their field emission properties and their use for cold electron sources.