Theory and simulations of electron transport and emission from a semiconductor nanotip

Andrei Piryatinski, Chengkun Huang, Thomas J. T. Kwan

Published 2019-01-08Version 1

An effective mass based model accounting for the conduction band quantization in semiconductor nanotip is developed to describe injected electron transport and subsequent electron emission from the nanotip. A transfer matrix formalism is used to treat electron scattering induced by the variation in the tip diameter and the electron emission. Numerical analysis of the scattering and emission probabilities is performed for a simple diamond nanotip geometry. Our scattering and emission models are subsequently combined with a Monte Carlo (MC) approach to simulate electron transport through the nanotip. The MC simulations, also accounting for the phonon scattering and externally applied electric field, are performed for the nanotip and an equivalent width diamond slab. An effect of the level quantization, electron scattering due to the nanotip diameter variation, and phonon scattering on the nanotip emission properties is identified and compared with the case of the bulk slab.