Shinku

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A small electrostatic particle separator has been used to study the vacuum discharge phenomena. The separator is constructed out of a pair of high voltage (± 600 kV) generator of Cockcroft-Walton type and a rectangular vacuum chamber (1×1×2 m³) evacuated to 5×10^-6 Torr by a turbo-molecular pump with pumping speed of 250 l/sec. Paralell plate electrodes of 400 mmφ were used. A new method to measure the pressure dependence of the maximum withstand voltage was employed with different experimental conditions, that is, conditioning time, kind of gas, electrode material, polarity of applied voltage, distance between electrodes and so on. There are two quite different break down mechanisms in the pressure region studied in this experiment, from 10^-6 to 10^-3 Torr. One is the extensively investigated gaseous discharge which is governed only by the kind of gas and the polarity. The other is the so called vacuum discharge, which exhibits complex behaviours. Our experimental results suggest that the ion exchange mechanism plays the most important role in the vacuum discharge phenomena in the pressure region concerned here.

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