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P: Plasmaphysik

P 6: Discharges

P 6.4: Talk

Thursday, April 5, 2001, 17:15–17:30, 2053

Instabilities in a planar gas discharge — •C. Strümpel¹, H.-G. Purwins¹, and Yu.A. Astrov² — ¹Institut für Angewandte Physik, Universität Münster, Corrensstraße 2-4, 48149 Münster — ²A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Insitute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg 194021, Russia

In a gas discharge device with planar geometry the destabilization of the spatial homogeneous discharge is investigated. The gas discharge is driven by a dc-voltage while the cathode consists of semi-insulating gallium arsenide. Depending on the conductivity of the cathode the first destabilization is either a pure temporal one or spatiotemporal in nature. In the first case the resulting state is one of homogeneous oscillations, in the second case non-stationary patterns occur. The basic element of these structures is a so-called current density filament which is a confined area in the discharge with raised current density. The diameter of such a filament is much smaller than the transversal extent of the discharge system.