Study of transient processes in nitrogen by measurements of dynamic breakdown voltages

¹ Department of Physics, University of Niš, PO Box 224, 18001 Niš, Serbia and Montenegro
² Institute of Physics, PO Box 68, 11080 Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro

Corresponding author: vidosav@pmf.ni.ac.yu

Received: 9 September 2003
Revised: 20 August 2004
Accepted: 22 October 2004
Published online: 28 January 2005

Abstract

In this paper the measurements of the dynamic breakdown voltages U_b for linearly rising pulses in nitrogen at low pressure are presented. The measurements were carried out for the rates of voltage rise k up to . Dependence of the breakdown voltages, delay times and electron yields on the rate of rise were obtained experimentally and theoretically under different conditions. It was found that the overvoltage and the mean effective electron yield is proportional to (Y is a number of generated electrons in the interelectrode space per second and P the breakdown probability), while the statistical time delay is proportional to . In the second part, the experimental breakdown voltage distributions were obtained, fitted by theoretical distributions and some breakdown parameters relevant to experimental conditions were determined. Based on the approximate analytical and numerical models, the dependence of the effective secondary electron yield γ on the overvoltage and on the rate of voltage rise were derived from these measurements. It was found that γ varies linearly with the overvoltage for a constant k, and the slope of γ is proportional to .