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13 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials
University of Ulster
On the possibility of long path breakdown affecting the Paschen curves for microdischarges
Funded through our £2M Cross-Border Centre for Intelligent Point of Care Sensors and in collaboration with Institute of Physics (Serbia), this fundamental study re-examines standard Paschen Law, a topic which still provokes controversy, and extends it into the regime of micro-scale plasmas where additional physical mechanisms have been predicted. It follows our earlier paper (DOI: 10.1088/0022-3727/41/19/194002) and an invited talk (www.qub.ac.uk/sites/icpig2011). Here we provide conclusive experimental evidence of the importance of long path breakdown and the impossibility of full Paschen curve determination in open structures.