Electrical breakdown in gases

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to gather information relevant to the electrical discharges and breakdown in insulating gases. References to the vast amount of literature on gas lasers, thermonuclear plasmas, magneto-hydrodynamics, high energy physics and many of the other related technical areas that make use of gas discharges are excluded from this chapter. An attempt has been made to include in the bibliography a complete list of pertinent reference material including monoenergetic beam data, swarm data and energy distributions. The material was gathered directly from the literature and it is possible that we may have overlooked some of the relevant papers.