| Abstract: | Electrical instability in a SI GaAs plates of the semiconductor gas discharge gap system (SGDGS) is studied experimentally in a wide range of the gas pressures, interelectrode distances and different diameters of the cathode areas. While being driven with a stationary voltage, it generates current and discharge light emission (DLE) instabilities with different amplitudes of the oscillation. It is shown that under the experimental conditions the interelectrode distance played only a passive role and was not responsible for the appearance of the DLE instability. At the same time for different diameters D of the GaAs plate areas the expanded range of current and DLE oscillations are observed. SGDGS with an N‐shaped CVC was analyzed using both the current and DLE data showing the electrical instability in the GaAs cathode. It was found that application of high feeding voltage to this cathode give rise to non‐uniform spatial distribution of the DLE, which disturbed the operation of the system. The experiment presents also a new metod to study and visualization of the electrical instabilities in high‐resistivity GaAs plates of large diameter. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim) |
