Effect of GaAs electronic structure on the performance of the GaAs- (Cs,O) photoemitter

Abstract

We have made a theoretical investigation of the emission process for the (111) A and B faces of GaAs activated to negative electron affinity taking into account the full Bloch nature of the wave function of the photoexcited electron. We find that, within the abrupt‐step model for the potential in the surface region, the emission probability is sensitive to the amount of band bending in the space‐charge region. We also find that, all other things being equal (magnitude of the negative electron affinity, amount of band bending, etc.), the emission probability for the B face is considerably higher than that for the A face.