The implications of collisions on the spatial profile of electric potential and the space-charge limited current

TL;DR

This paper investigates how collisions affect the electric potential profile and current in diodes, deriving a unified model that interpolates between collisionless and collisional regimes with high accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a general power-law model for the potential profile in collisional diodes, linking the exponent to collision parameters and providing an analytic expression for the space-charge limited current.

Findings

The potential exponent varies between 4/3 and 3/2 depending on collision frequency.

Derived an analytic SCLC equation that closely matches exact solutions within 6%.

Identified the transition point where the diode behavior shifts from vacuum to collisional.

Abstract

The space-charge limited current (SCLC) in a vacuum diode is given by the Child-Langmuir law (CLL), whose electric potential $\varphi(x) = (\it{x/D})^{4/3}$, where x is the spatial coordinate across the gap and D is the gap separation distance. For a collisional diode, SCLC is given by the Mott-Gurney law (MGL) and $\varphi(x) = (x/D)^{3/2}$. This Letter applies a capacitance argument for SCLC and uses the transit time from a recent exact solution for collisional SCLC to show that $\varphi(x) = (x/D)^{\xi}$ for a general collisional gap, where $4/3 \leqslant \xi \leqslant 3/2$. Furthermore, $\xi$ is strictly a function of $\nu T$, where $\nu$ is the collision frequency and T is the electron transit time. Using this definition of $\xi$, we estimate the spatial dependence of the electron velocity and use the capacitance to derive an analytic equation for collisional SCLC that agrees within $\sim5-6\%$ of the exact solution that requires solving parametrically through T. We derive equations in the limits of $\nu \longrightarrow 0$ and $\nu\longrightarrow \infty$ for general $\xi$ that asymptotically recover the CLL as $\nu \longrightarrow 0$ and the MGL as $\nu \longrightarrow \infty$. Matching these limits shows that $\xi \simeq 1.40$ and $V \propto D^2\nu^2$ at the transition from a vacuum to collisional diode for any device condition.