jamesr wrote: Its not quite as simple as that. There may be many filaments, and each one could be comprised of lots of micro-filaments. Plasma is an unstable thing. Density & temperature gradients will tend to cause instabilities which will cause splits and reconnections of the filaments and turbulent behaviour.
That leads to another question or few.
1. How does the plasma sheath rotate during the axial runout phase? This would seem to imply huge spikes in the current waveform.
2. Would a more correct visualization be that each cathode’s filament system is the base of a corkscrewing spiral?
