The development of field emission display (FED) has been the subject of (increasing) scientific (interest) due to their extensive application in flat panel display and microelectronics area. The cathode(electron-emitter) material is one of the key factors for FED. So far

many kinds of emitters were discovered

such as metal emitters (Spindle-type field emitters)

silicon emitters

diamond film emitters

diamond-like carbon (DLC) film (emitters) and carbon nanotube emitters. But it is intricate for most of the emitters in producing process and difficult to be fabricated in large area. However

some polymers

which are quite cheap

easy to synthesize

soluble in organic solvents to make high quality films in large area by using convenient methods

were created in making the emitters. Pure polymer emitters were demonstrated by Musa

and further work was done in our group. The great difference between our work and Musa’s is that we used conducting polymers while Musa used insulated polymers. What is more

Musa’s paper only gives the field emission I-V curve

the light emission image had not been showed. We believe that the conducting polymers have high conductivity

which is expected to bring about a low turn-on emission field

high emitting current density

and better picture quality. In our experiment

the conducting polymers

CSA-doped polyaniline (PANI-CSA)

was made on a cleaned 1cm×1cm ITO substrate by spin-coating method and then dried on a heater. A display prototype has been fabricated using ZnO:Zn phosphor-coated ITO as an anode. The prototype of our FED device was placed into a vacuum chamber for field emission testing. The relationship between the emission current and the voltage fits the Fowler-Nordheim equation

and the enhancing factor β calculated based on our I-V data is 430. The emission current stability was tested for 50 min. No obvious decrease of the current was observed. By way of studying the surface appearance of conducting polymer after field emission

we analyze the emission mechanism and consider the sunken and protrude shapes produced from initial planar surface by applied high fields playing an important role in increasing the enhancing factor.