A review on recent progress of thermionic cathode

As the performance of vacuum electron devices is essentially governed by the properties of their cathodes, developing efficient and durable thermionic cathode is necessary and highly desired to meet the boosting requirements of vacuum electron devices. This review summarized the progress made in the past decades with a detailed discussion on the occurred various thermionic cathodes and their features, and the understandings of the correlation between the emission properties and the composition, where structure and synthesis method are well illustrated. Furthermore, dispenser cathodes with novel structures and emission mechanism are highlighted to indicate the recent achievement in this area of research, and Sc-cathode is considered as a promising candidate for the next-generation vacuum electron devices due to the greatly improved efficiency. However, challenges still exist to meet the ever-growing demands of thermionic cathode with collaborative requirement of high performance, easy fabrication and inadequate reproducibility.