Breakdown Voltage Distributions in Ne-Filled Diode at 1.33 mbar with Corona Appearance in Pre-breakdown Regime

Abstract

The electrical breakdown of a gas subject to an up-ramping external voltage is studied, experimentally and theoretically, under conditions leading to the appearance of a positive corona at the anode in the pre-breakdown regime. Experimentally, voltage ramps with various rates k in the interval ranging from 0.3 V/s to 26 kV/s are applied to the diode, with the histogram of breakdown voltages being recorded for each rate. The theoretical model gives attention to the pre-breakdown multiplication causing the corona, which tends to reduce the statistical time delay \(t_{S}\) before the primary electron is released and hence to make \(t_{S}\) comparable to the formative time \(t_{F}\). The multiplication being therefore expected to affect the voltage dependence of the electron yield, a nonlinear equation relating the yield to the overvoltage is introduced. The resulting theoretical expression for the breakdown voltage distribution agrees well with the experimental histograms. Especially noteworthy is the good agreement with the low-voltage tail of the distribution, a segment of the data that has challenged previous theoretical analyses of the problem.