Investigations of space charge limited effects in diode with Coulomb's law

Abstract

Vacuum diode is a critical component of the apparatus which is the source of electron beams, the emitted electrons from the cathode of the diode have strong space charge limited effects. Based on Coulomb's law, the distributions of electric field in cathode-anode gap for different values of the ratio of radius to gap distance, R/D, are calculated numerically with the model of space charge limited effects in a planar vacuum diode. This method can avoid solving a non-linear differential equation which is used to yield the Child-Langmuir law from Poisson's equation. The results demonstrate that the only difference between the results from Coulomb's law and Child-Langmuir law is a modification factor, which is shown to be related to the potential difference across the gap. The results also show that one-dimensional space charge limited law will be a good approximation for the practical planar diode if the parameter R/D is beyond 10, but it can present a large error if the parameter R/D is small. Therefore it should be cautiously used.