Hot-Hole—Electron Cascades in Field Emission from Metals

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Recent field-emission tunneling experiments have shown a current-dependent tail in the energy distribution for energies above the Fermi energy. This tail can be understood in terms of the products of a cascade process initiated by the injection of hot holes (removal of electrons by field emission) into the interacting electron gas or metal conduction band. The derived shapes of the tails, numerical values of the high-energy distributions, and field dependences of the current in the tails are in good agreement with our experimentally observed results.