Abstract
An atmospheric pressure glow discharge was generated using a needle-array electrode in nitrogen. A pulsed high voltage with short rise time under 10 ns was employed to generate streamer discharges simultaneously at all needle tips. The large number of streamer discharges prevented glow-to-arc transition caused by inhomogeneous thermalization. Semiconductor opening switch (SOS) diodes were employed as an opening switch to shorten the rise time. The glow current was drastically decreased by eliminating the SOS diode, in which case the charging voltage was directly applied to the electrode. Spatial- and time-averaged electron densities in a positive column were estimated from calculations based on nitrogen swarm data. The density was estimated to be 1.8×1011 cm-3, which was much larger than 9.7×109 cm-3 in the case without the SOS diode.