In this study, a simple, efficient, and economical process is reported for the direct synthesis of carbon nanotube (CNT) field emitters on metal alloy. Given that CNT field emitters can be customized with ease for compact and cold field emission devices, they are promising replacements for thermionic emitters in widely accessible X-ray source electron guns. High performance CNT emitter samples were prepared in optimized plasma conditions through the plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) process and subsequently characterized by using a scanning electron microscope, tunneling electron microscope, and Raman spectroscopy. For the cathode current, field emission (FE) characteristics with respective turn on (1 μA/cm2) and threshold (1 mA/cm2) field of 2.84 and 4.05 V/μm were obtained. For a field of 5.24 V/μm, maximum current density of 7 mA/cm2 was achieved and a field enhancement factor β of 2838 was calculated. In addition, the CNT emitters sustained a current density of 6.7 mA/cm2 for 420 min under a field of 5.2 V/μm, confirming good operational stability. Finally, an X-ray generated image of an integrated circuit was taken using the compact field emission device developed herein.

Monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides are ideal materials to control both spin and valley degrees of freedom either electrically or optically. Nevertheless, optical excitation mostly generates excitons species with inherently short lifetime and spin/valley relaxation time. Here we demonstrate a very efficient spin/valley optical pumping of resident electrons in n-doped WSe2 and WS2 monolayers. We observe that, using a continuous wave laser and appropriate doping and excitation densities, negative trion doublet lines exhibit circular polarization of opposite sign and the photoluminescence intensity of the triplet trion is more than four times larger with circular excitation than with linear excitation. We interpret our results as a consequence of a large dynamic polarization of resident electrons using circular light.

The HERAPDF2.0 ensemble of parton distribution functions (PDFs) was introduced in 2015. The final stage is presented, a next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) analysis of the HERA data on inclusive deep inelastic ep scattering together with jet data as published by the H1 and ZEUS collaborations. A perturbative QCD fit, simultaneously of $$\alpha _s(M_Z^2)$$ α s ( M Z 2 ) and the PDFs, was performed with the result $$\alpha _s(M_Z^2)= 0.1156 \pm 0.0011~\mathrm{(exp)}~ ^{+0.0001}_{-0.0002}~ \mathrm{(model}$$ α s ( M Z 2 ) = 0.1156 ± 0.0011 ( exp ) - 0.0002 + 0.0001 ( model $$\mathrm{+ parameterisation)}~ \pm 0.0029~\mathrm{(scale)}$$ + parameterisation ) ± 0.0029 ( scale ) . The PDF sets of HERAPDF2.0Jets NNLO were determined with separate fits using two fixed values of $$\alpha _s(M_Z^2)$$ α s ( M Z 2 ) , $$\alpha _s(M_Z^2)=0.1155$$ α s ( M Z 2 ) = 0.1155 and 0.118, since the latter value was already chosen for the published HERAPDF2.0 NNLO analysis based on HERA inclusive DIS data only. The different sets of PDFs are presented, evaluated and compared. The consistency of the PDFs determined with and without the jet data demonstrates the consistency of HERA inclusive and jet-production cross-section data. The inclusion of the jet data reduced the uncertainty on the gluon PDF. Predictions based on the PDFs of HERAPDF2.0Jets NNLO give an excellent description of the jet-production data used as input.