*Correspondence: Timothy S. Fisher , Birck Nanotechnology Center, 1205 West State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA e-mail: [email protected] This article describes advances in thermionic and photo-emission materials and applications dating back to the work on thermionic emission by Guthrie (1873) and the photoelectric effect by Hertz (1893). Thermionic emission has been employed for elec...

In this paper for the first time a precise theoretical analysis of efficiencies and power densities for nano-scaled thermionic vacuum gap devices is presented. Plane electrodes with nano-gaps will be treated first. With nonplanar electrodes (nanotips) enhanced electron field emission occurs, giving rise to new design options. The theories of field and thermionic emission are combined by calcula...

The competition between electron emission and unimolecular dissociation following the absorption of a single photon is studied for small clusters of various elements. Electron emission results from either direct photoemission, observed as a series of peaks in the spectrum, or thermionic emission, giving rise to a continuous background. Depending on the energetics involved, thermionic emission i...

We present a numerical model in which the thermionic and tunneling mechanisms across an abrupt heterojunction interface are taken into account on the basis of the one dimensional drift-diffusion formulation. We use an expression of thermionic-field emission current formulated based on the WKB approximation as a boundary condition at the abrupt heterointerface which eventually limits the current...

Diamond-based low-work function thermionic electron emitters are in high demand for applications ranging from electron guns and space thrusters to electrical energy converters. A key requirement of such diamond-based electron sources is hydrogen termination of the surfaces which can significantly reduce the emission barrier. However, at high temperatures (≤600°C), terminated hydrogen begins to ...

Diamond-based thermionic emission devices could provide a means to produce clean and renewable energy through direct heat-to-electrical energy conversion. Hindering progress of the technology are the thermionic output current and threshold temperature of the emitter cathode. In this report, we study the effects on thermionic emission caused by in situ exposure of the diamond cathode to beta rad...

We introduce an application of thermionic emission in a PMT photocathode. Because of the nonlinear dependence of thermionic emission on absorbed laser power, a conventional PMT is found to produce a virtual pinhole effect that rejects unfocused light at least as strongly as a physical pinhole. This virtual pinhole effect is exploited in a scanning transmission confocal microscope equipped with ...

Solar-energy conversion usually takes one of two forms: the 'quantum' approach, which uses the large per-photon energy of solar radiation to excite electrons, as in photovoltaic cells, or the 'thermal' approach, which uses concentrated sunlight as a thermal-energy source to indirectly produce electricity using a heat engine. Here we present a new concept for solar electricity generation, photon...

Thin film thermionic coolers use selective emission of hot electrons over a heterostructure barrier layer from emitter to collector resulting in evaporative cooling. In this paper a detailed theory of electron transport perpendicular to the multilayer superlattice structures is presented. Using Fermi-Dirac statistics, density-of-states for a finite quantum well and the quantum mechanical reflec...

Thermionic electron emission forms the basis of both electron sources for a variety of applications and a direct energy conversion process that is compact and scalable. The present study characterizes thermionic emission from boron-doped nanocrystalline diamond films with hydrogen and nitrophenyl surface termination layers. A hemispherical energy analyzer was used to measure electron energy dis...