Field Electron Emission Characteristics and Physical Mechanism of Individual Single-Layer Graphene

Due to its difficulty, experimental measurement of field emission from a single layer graphene has not been,reported;although field emission from a two dimensional (2D) regime has been an attractive topic. The open surface and sharp edge of graphene are beneficial for electron emission A 2D, geometrical effect, such as massless Dirac fermion, can lead to new mechanism in field emission Here, we report our findings from in situ field electron emission Characterization on an individual singe-layer graphene and the understanding of the related mechanism The measurement of field emission from the edges was done using a microanode probe equipped in a scanning electron microscope We show that repeatable stable field emission current can be obtained after a careful conditioning process This enables us to examine experimentally the typical features of the field emission from a 2D regime We plot current versus applied field data, respectively, in In(I/E-3/2) similar to 1/E and In(I/E-3)similar to 1/E-2 coordinates, which have recently been proposed for field emission trim graphene in high and low field regimes It is observed that the plots all exhibit an upward bending feature, revealing that the field emission processes undergo from a low to high field transition We discuss with theoretical analysis the physical mechanism responsible for the new phenomena