Field emission from organic materials

Field emission displays (FEDs) show great promise as high performance flat panel displays. The light emission process is efficient, long lifetimes are possible with high brightness, and bright passive matrix displays can be built. Because passive matrix displays don't need a transistor backplane, it was once thought that these displays would be cheaper to fabricate than their competitors. It is now clear that this is not the case. Fabricating a transistor backplane has turned out to be less expensive than micromachining an array of uniform field emitter tips with aligned gates. Competing technologies which use an active backplane (such as active matrix liquid crystal panels) have become ubiquitous, and FED technologies developed to date have been too expensive for the consumer market. This thesis presents a new strategy for creating a low-cost field emission display. This strategy begins by creating a field emitter out of organic conductors-a class of materials mostly neglected to date for this application. The organic emitter is made by copying a non-lithographic template. The process takes 5 minutes, occurs at room temperature and at atmospheric pressure, and does not damage the template. We show that organic conductors are easy to pattern into regular patterns and can form structures which exhibit field emission, with field enhancement factors of about 100-600 times. The field emission follows a Fowler-Nordheim characteristic. Also explored are some of the properties of organic conductors in vacuum such as conductivity over time, the interaction of the organic field emitter with background gases, and the conduction mechanism. In particular, we show that oxygen degrades the emission properties of organic field emission tips, and that organic materials retain sufficient conductivity in vacuum to serve as field emitters.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Kymissis, Ioannis, 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Akintunde I. Akinwande.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16947

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16947