A laser excited, sub-nanosecond, pulsed electron beam system is described. The system consists of a high voltage pulser and a coaxial triggered spark gap. The liquid spark gap discharges into a pulse forming line designed to produce and maintain a flat voltage pulse of 1ns duration on the cathode of a photodiode. A synchronized laser is used to illuminate the photo-cathode to produce an electro...

The importance of the photon-photon pair production process (γ + γ′ → e+ + e−) to form pair production cascades in pulsar polar caps is investigated within the framework of the Ruderman-Sutherland vacuum gap model. It is found that this process is unimportant if the polar caps are not hot enough, but will play a non-negligible role in the pair formation cascades when the polar cap temperatures ...

Electrical heating of the graphite die and punch assembly is a unique feature of the spark plasma sintering (SPS) process. The high currents needed to heat the die, despite its low resistance, can produce an electric field across the ceramic specimens that may be enough to induce field assisted sintering. Despite the large number of publications of SPS, the electric field intensity has not been...

This paper considers three interconnected problems: (i) initiation of a downward lightning in a thundercloud and that of an upward lightning near tall grounded structures; (ii) conditions for lightning development in the cloud-to-ground gap and the effects of lightning trajectory and branching on discharge parameters; and (iii) physical mechanism of the lightning return stroke and peculiarities...

A laser spark formed by the focused beam of a ns high energy laser in a gas filled interaction chamber can mimic energetic events in the early Earth atmosphere, which are thought to be instrumental in the synthesis of simple chemical compounds, such as some amino acides, [1, 2], which later might have participated in more complex organic syntheses leading to the origin of terrestrial life. Some...

John Walsh's research on electric fish, carried out between 1772 and 1775, proved fundamental for demonstrating that electricity might be involved in animal physiology, and, moreover, in favouring a period of great progress in both the physiology and physics of electrical phenomena. However, Walsh is hardly known to modern neuroscientists and is largely neglected by science historians also. One...

Surface characteristic of particles is one of the main parameters controlling the properties of deposited layer in electrophoretic deposition. To modify the surface characteristic of particles, one of the methods is the addition of additives to the suspensions of powder-solvent. There are many reports dealing with the effect of surface characteristics of particles on uniformity and pattern of d...