Dynamics of a Field Emitted Beam from a Microscopic Inhomogeneous Cathode

We investigate by molecular dynamics simulations (Torfason et al., 2015; 2016) a beam of electrons released via field emission from a planar cathode surface of $1~\mu \text {m}^{2}$ with an inhomogeneous two-level work function, $\phi _{\text {low}}$ and $\phi _{\text {high}}$ . A rectangular grid, where each cell can have one out of two values of the work function, is used as a model. The nu...