Branching of negative streamers in free flight

Abstract

We have recently shown that a negative streamer in a sufficiently high homogeneous field can branch spontaneously due to a Laplacian instability, rather than approach a stationary mode of propagation with fixed radius. In our previous simulations, the streamer started from a wide initial ionization seed on the cathode. We here demonstrate, in improved simulations, that a streamer emerging from a single electron branches in the same way. In fact, though the evolving streamer is much more narrow, it branches after an even shorter propagation distance.