A study of parameters useful for describing plasma-opening switches

Plasma opening switches (POS) have been used continually and studied since their introduction in 1976. During that period they have performed well for prepulse suppression and sharpening the front of the power pulse. Their use for long conduction time and rapid opening to stand off high voltage in the same POS has met with very limited success. There has been a large theoretical effort involving models and particle-in-cell simulations (PICS), but the connection between theory and experiment has been tenuous at best, and convincing agreement with experiment has been minimal. The authors believe progress toward long conduction and rapid opening would be faster if macroscopic physical parameters describing the physics of the switch were used to compare experiment to simulation. One of these parameters (electron flow impedance) has been used to describe the electrical characteristics of the POS. This parameter provides a good description of both the standard POS (SPOS) and the magnetically controlled POS (MCPOS) because its value is sensibly independent of load current. An additional parameter, the effective mass of the plasma, was measured in one MCPOS experiment. In this article we describe other parameters important to operation of the SPOS and the MCPOS, and parameters important in designing PICS used to study these devices