Abstract
A method of refrigeration using thermal-field electron emission from nanoscale emitters of arbitrary work function in a vacuum crossed-field gap is proposed. With an external crossed magnetic field, an additional potential barrier near the anode is created to restrict the tunneling of low-energy electrons (below the Fermi energy) and thus provids a versatile cooling capability from 300 down to
10
K
. Optimal conditions are determined numerically and analytically, which give local cooling power densities (per emitter) of about
600
kW
∕
cm
2
(at
300
K
),
2.7
kW
∕
cm
2
(at
50
K
), and
20
W
∕
cm
2
(at
10
K
).