|
|
|
In a cathode ray tube, the "cathode" is a heated filament (not unlike the filament in a normal light bulb). The heated filament is in a vacuum created inside a glass "tube." The "ray" is a stream of electrons that naturally pour off a heated cathode into the vacuum. Electrons are negative. The anode is positive, so it attracts the electrons pouring off the cathode. In a TV's cathode ray tube, the stream of electrons is focused by a focusing anode into a tight beam and then accelerated by an accelerating anode. This tight, high-speed beam of electrons flies through the vacuum in the tube and hits the flat screen at the other end of the tube. This screen is coated with phosphor, which glows when struck by the beam.In a CRT, phosphor coats the inside of the screen. When the electron beam strikes the phosphor, it makes the screen glow. In a black-and-white screen, there is one phosphor that glows white when struck. In a color screen, there are three phosphors arranged as dots or stripes that emit red, green and blue light.
There are also three electron beams to illuminate the three different colors together. There are thousands of different phosphors that have been formulated. They are characterized by their emission color and the length of time emission lasts after they are excited. In a black-and-white TV, the screen is coated with white phosphor and the electron beam "paints" an image onto the screen by moving the electron beam across the phosphor a line at a time. To "paint" the entire screen, electronic circuits inside the TV use the magnetic coils to move the electron beam in a "raster scan" pattern across and down the screen. The beam paints one line across the screen from left to right. It then quickly flies back to the left side, moves down slightly and paints another horizontal line, and so on down the screen A color TV screen differs from a black-and-white screen in three ways:
• There are three electron beams that move simultaneously across the screen. They are named the red, green and blue beams.
• The screen is not coated with a single sheet of phosphor as in a black-and-white TV. Instead, the screen is coated with red, green and blue phosphors arranged in dots or stripes. If you turn on your TV or computer monitor and look closely at the screen with a magnifying glass, you will be able to see the dots or stripes.
• On the inside of the tube, very close to the phosphor coating, there is a thin metal screen called a shadow mask. This mask is perforated with very small holes that are aligned with the phosphor dots (or stripes) on the screen.
When a color TV needs to create a red dot, it fires the red beam at the red phosphor. Similarly for green and blue dots. To create a white dot, red, green and blue beams are fired simultaneously -- the three colors mix together to create white. To create a black dot, all three beams are turned off as they scan past the dot. All other colors on a TV screen are combinations of red, green and blue. The earliest version of the CRT was a cold-cathode diode, a modification of the Crookes tube (used to produce X-rays) with a phosphor-coated screen, sometimes called a Braun tube. The first version to use a hot cathode was developed by J. B. Johnson (who gave his name to the term Johnson noise) and H. W. Weinhart of Western Electric and became a commercial product in 1922. Cathode rays are streams of high speed electrons emitted from the heated cathode of a vacuum tube. In a cathode ray tube, the electrons are carefully directed into a beam, and this beam is deflected by a magnetic field to scan the surface at the viewing end (anode), which is lined with phosphorescent material (usually based on transition metals or rare earths). When the electrons hit this material, light is emitted.
In case of a television and modern computer monitors, the entire front area of the tube is scanned in a fixed pattern called a raster, and a picture is created by modulating the intensity of the electron beam according to the programme's video signal. The beam in all modern TV sets is scanned with a magnetic field applied to the neck of the tube with a "magnetic yoke", a set of coils driven by electronic circuits. This use of electromagnets to steer the electron beam is referred to as "magnetic deflection".
In case of an oscilloscope, the intensity of the electron beam is kept constant, and the picture is drawn by steering the beam along an arbitrary path. Usually, the horizontal deflection is proportional to time, and the vertical deflection is proportional to the signal. The tube for this kind of use is longer and narrower, and deflection is done by applying an electrical field via deflection plates built into the tube's neck. The use of an electrical field (so-called "electrostatic deflection") allows the electron beam to be steered much more rapidly than with a magnetic field, where the inductance of the elec
|
|
|
|