Field evaporation: A kinetic Monte Carlo approach on the influence of temperature

The temperature effects on the field evaporation of atoms from a field emitter are numerically investigated by modeling the distribution of the electric field across the specimen surface. The field evaporation is described as an Arrhenius process with a field dependent activation barrier. The model can reproduce the experimentally observed dependence of the mean evaporation field with the temperature. It brings a new insight on the field distribution almost not accessible experimentally. A variation of the number of surface atoms really involved in the process at different temperatures is shown. This incorporation of the temperature in the model leads to a change in the order of field evaporation, causing a loss of spatial resolution that is estimated as a function of the tip temperature. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.