Fast pulsed diffuse discharges are widely used for pulsed power applications such as gas lasers and switches. A goal in both fields is to reduce the rise and fall times of these discharges and to develop tools to predict their time dependent behavior. Most diffuse discharges are weakly ionized and their behavior is dominated by collisions of electrons and neutrals. The current research project is concerned with their influence of specific components in a gas mixture on the discharge characteristic and on the time dependent behavior of the discharge to allow its optimization for specific applications. This proposal addresses investigations of the transient behavior of gas discharges under the influence of fast changes of reduced electric field strength E/N and/or an electron source, S. The reduction of rise and fall times into the nansecond and sub-nanosecond region requires considering the non steady state electron kinetic and its influence on the time dependent behavior of the discharge. The work includes theoretical investigations aimed towards a description of the non equilibrium electron kinetic and experimental investigations which will allow to prove the theoretical results. The theoretical investigations are based on a new numerical method, the Monte Carlo Flux method, which is being developed. This method improves the resolution function and simplifies calculations of transient processes. A suitable experimental set up to operate fast pulsed discharges will be designed and constructed and experiments will be performed to prove these model calculations.
