Breakdown characteristics of pseudospark under nanosecond pulsed voltages

The pseudospark discharge has been shown to be a promising source of high brightness, high intensity electron beam pulses. An experimental investigation of pseudospark has been conducted using a flexible discharge chamber. In order to study the breakdown characteristics of pseudospark under nanosecond pulse voltage, some special designs of the electrodes are adopted to improve the stability of pseudospark. In this paper, the breakdown voltage of the pseudospark device is measured for a wide range of gas pressure and anode-cathode gap distance to find the range of gas pressure with different gap distances under nanosecond pulse voltage and the breakdown voltage with different gas pressures and gap distances. In addition, the breakdown characteristics of multi-gap pseudospark discharger have also been researched to study the relationship between the breakdown voltage and the number of the gaps. In the end, an empirical formula is obtained for the breakdown voltage, the gas pressure, the gap distance and the number of the gaps.