Investigations of electron emission from DLC thin films deposited by means of RF PCVD at various self-bias voltages

The aim of this paper is to report the results of field emission experiments on undoped, flat diamond-like carbon (DLC) thin films deposited at various self-bias voltages using radio frequency plasma chemical vapor deposition (RF PCVD) technique. It has been observed that the emission properties improve when the absolute value of self-bias voltage becomes higher, e.g., the turn-on field value decreases. The correlation between electron field emission and sp2 content in these films showed improvement of electron emission properties of DLC films for higher amount of sp2 phase.