Test bed for time jitter studies of laser-triggered gas-discharge switches

Laser-triggering of high-voltage spark gaps is a reliable method of obtaining low switching time jitter. To further the advantage of laser triggering compared to other trigger methods an optical fibre is used to guide the laser pulse into the switch. This paper presents a test bed for the study of laser-triggered spark gaps. An initial test series using a 1064-nm, 5-ns laser pulse shows that a time jitter down to, or even below, one nanosecond is readily achieved for a normalised voltage down to 0.6, the threshold laser intensity required to trigger the spark gap being below 2 TW/m².