Abstract
This paper is based on a tutorial presented by the author as a part of the Minicourse on charged particle beams and high-powered pulsed sources given at the 2017 International Conference on Plasma Sciences at Atlantic City, NJ, USA. It is intended to provide a brief overview of the phenomenology and physics of the vacuum surface flashover process. These mechanisms will be used to motivate techniques commonly employed to improve the voltage standoff of insulators. In addition to serving as the primary limiting mechanism for vacuum insulators, vacuum surface flashover has a number of beneficial applications, primarily due to its ability to provide a simple pulsed plasma source, and a number of these applications will be discussed.
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