This article is cited in 2 papers

Gas Discharges, Plasmas

Peculiarities of grid control over the current in a discharge with a cathode spot on the cesium liquid-metal cathode

V. B. Kaplan, A. M. Martsinovskiy, I. I. Stolyarov

Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg

Abstract: We report on the results of successful implementation of full grid control in a cesium discharge with a cathode spot. The discharge is quenched by a negative grid pulse for a discharge current density up to 75 A/cm$^2$ in the grid plane for voltage switching up to 100 V in the pressure range 0.5–1.5 Pa for a voltage drop of 5–6 V in the discharge. It is shown that quenching is the break-off type. The discovered effect of “evacuation” of the heavy component (ions) from the grid-anode gap to the cathode region leads to an unusually long (hundreds of microseconds) time of stabilization of the steady state in the discharge under the experimental conditions.

Received: 10.12.2010

 English version: Technical Physics, 2011, 56:11, 1579–1587

Bibliographic databases:

•