GAS BREAKDOWN EXPERIMENTS
Conduct experiments on the gas breakdown at micro to nanoscale under various pressure
MIRCOSCALE GAS BREAKDOWN
The micro-scale gas breakdown is traditionally thought to be governed by Paschen's Law until people start to observe deviance from the law when the gap size is below 5 microns (estimated). Studies have been made to study the factors affecting the breakdown voltage.
Our research uses a pin to plate geometry and studied the effect of surface roughness and work function of the cathode. A crater is discovered after several breakdowns and the materials are found on the tip of the anode.
NANO SCALE ELECTRON EMISSION
Nanoscale breakdown and field emission use a pre-manufactured device on the chip to test the I-V curve at different gap sizes and electrode geometry. The initial experiment is conducted in atmospheric pressure and using a probe station. The second stage of the experiment uses a packaged chip carrier to test the devices in a vacuum chamber with varying pressure.
Refrence
Go, D., & Pohlman, D.A. (2010). A mathematical model of the modified Paschen's curve for the breakdown in microscale gaps. Journal of Applied Physics, 107, 103303.
Bhattacharjee, S., and Chowdhury, T., “Experimental investigation of transition from Fowler–Nordheim field emission to space-charge-limited flows in a nanogap,” Applied Physics Letters, vol. 95, Aug. 2009, Art. no. 061501.
R. S. Brayfield, II, A. J. Fairbanks, A. M. Loveless, S. Gao, A. Dhanabal, W. Li, C. Darr, W. Wu, and A. L. Garner, “The impact of cathode surface roughness and multiple breakdown events on microscale gas breakdown at atmospheric pressure,” J. Appl. Phys., vol. 125, 2019, Art. no. 203302.
J. Lin, P. Y. Wong, P. Yang, Y. Y. Lau, W. Tang, and P. Zhang, “Electric field distribution and current emission in a miniaturized geometrical diode,” J. Appl. Phys. vol. 121, 2017, Art. no. 244301.
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Purdue University
©2021 by Weihang Li.