Dependence of the ion energy in vacuum spark plasma flow on current pulse shape features

Abstract

Mass-energy spectra of an ion flow from 300 k V, 200 ns vacuum spark discharge plasma were analyzed. Energy distributions of ion species were obtained from single-discharge shots accorded with synchronized current and voltage pulse oscillograms. It was found, that peak energy values of these distributions have a strong probability to be close to a voltage magnitude at the moment corresponding to a pulse spike on the current oscillogram.