Fabrication of single crystalline SmB 6 nanocone arrays and investigation of their field emission properties

As a typcial kondo insulator, SmB 6 has attracted most of attention in recent years. But their corresponding nanostructures are hard to fabricate due to the growth technique. In this paper, uniform SmB 6 nanocone arrays have been successfully fabricated by a simple chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method. The field emission (FE) behaviors of SmB 6 nanocone arrays were investigated to reveal their surface properties. FE measurement results show that SmB 6 nanocone arrays have a low turn-on electric field of 1.84 V/μm (at 10 μA/cm 2 ) and good emission stability, which may have potential applications in FE area.