Electrons with Anomalous Energy Generated in Gas-Filled and Vacuum Diodes

Abstract: It is shown that, when high-voltage pulses (with a voltage amplitude exceeding 100 kV in centimeter gaps) with a leading edge duration of 1 ns or shorter are applied to gas-filled and vacuum electric discharge diodes, electrons with kinetic energies nominally exceeding the amplitude of the applied voltage are detected. In the experiments, electron beam attenuation curves were measured in absorbers consisting of Al foil of varying thicknesses. These curves were used to reconstruct the electron beam energy spectrum by regularizing the solution of an integral equation based on deep machine learning. The obtained spectra contain electrons with anomalously high energies, the proportion of which, depending on the conditions, can reach 25 percent. A control experiment with a long voltage pulse on a large-area vacuum diode (voltage 150 kV, pulse duration 35 microseconds, vacuum gap 12 cm, electrode area 75 x 15 cm2) showed that the proportion of electrons with anomalous energies is less than 0.2 percent. Experiments have shown that the main mechanism for generating electrons with anomalous energy is the spatio-temporal synchronism of the motion of fast electrons in the enhanced field formed in the gap by space charge.