Abstract
Breakdowns (BDs) may occur in high-voltage applications even in ultrahigh vacuum conditions. Previously, we showed that it is important to pay attention to the post-BD voltage recovery in order to limit the appearance of secondary BDs associated with the primary ones. This can improve the overall efficiency of the high-voltage device. In this study, we focus on the optimization of the linear post-BD voltage recovery, with the principle aim of alleviating the problem of the secondary BDs. We investigate voltage recovery scenarios with different starting voltages and slopes of linear voltage increase by using a pulsed dc system. We find that a higher number of pulses during the voltage recovery produces fewer secondary BDs and a lower overall BD rate. Lowering the number of pulses led to more dramatic voltage recovery resulting in higher BD rates. A steeper voltage increase rate led to a more localized occurrence of the secondary BDs near the end of the voltage recovery period. It was also found that the peak BD probability is regularly observed around 1 s after the end of the ramping period and that its value decreases exponentially with the amount of energy put into the system during the ramping. The value also decays exponentially with a half-life of ($1.4\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.3$) ms if the voltage only increased between the voltage recovery steps.
Highlights
Vacuum arc breakdown (BD) is an event where a conductive plasma channel forms between two metal surfaces separated by a vacuum gap [1]
We find that a higher number of pulses during the voltage recovery produces fewer secondary BDs and a lower overall BD rate
For the step-wise voltage ramping scenario with 20 steps, the theoretical and measured curves coincide, since a short pause was used in these experiments in between the voltage increase and the start of pulsing to properly adjust the power supply to the new voltage
Summary
Vacuum arc breakdown (BD) is an event where a conductive plasma channel forms between two metal surfaces separated by a vacuum gap [1]. Such events are common in any application utilizing high-electric fields, including particle accelerators [2,3], rf power sources [4,5], and vacuum interrupters [6]. Pivotal in minimizing the BD frequency is the understanding of the basic mechanisms driving the system toward the formation of a BD spot and the BD characteristics and their possible correlation with macroscopically adjustable parameters Such understanding contributes to the development of safe and cost-efficient high-voltage (HV) applications. The BD phenomenon has been studied for more than a hundred years [7,8,9,10], the details of the process and its different stages are still extensively debated [11,12,13,14]
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