One of the key challenges in the design of gas lasers powered by pulsed power circuits pertains to reducing the flow of current through the electrodes during the filamentary discharge phase. This phase occurs after the lasing period (“volume glow”) is terminated due to discharge instabilities and the current flow during this period is referred to as late currents. Late currents contribute to electrode erosion. The ejected electrode material contaminates the gas, and lowering the service life of the laser. Snubber circuits are an economic solution to reducing late currents in pulsed power circuits that do not employ a magnetic switch. In a simple snubber, which is connected directly across the main storage/drive capacitor $C_{0}$ , it was found that the stray series inductances of both $C_{0}$ and the high voltage snubber diodes significantly reduced the magnitude of current flowing through the snubber. A new coaxial capacitor and snubber assembly was proposed to improve the effectiveness of the snubber in reducing the late currents. The design exploited the high degree of mutual coupling between the concentric coaxial cylinders to reduce the total inductance in the snubber loop. Experimental results showed an almost 40% reduction in the total charge that flows through the discharge in the late currents stage. Although the improvement was significant, it is expected that improvements to the construction quality of the prototype could potentially lower the late currents even further.

中文翻译：

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最小化脉冲功率气体激光系统中的晚期电流

设计由脉冲电源电路供电的气体激光器的主要挑战之一是减少丝状放电阶段流过电极的电流。这个阶段发生在激光周期（“体积辉光”）由于放电不稳定性而终止之后，在此期间的电流被称为延迟电流。延迟电流会导致电极腐蚀。喷出的电极材料会污染气体，降低激光器的使用寿命。缓冲电路是一种经济的解决方案，可用于减少不采用磁性开关的脉冲电源电路中的延迟电流。在一个简单的缓冲器中，它直接连接在主存储/驱动电容器的两端 $C_{0}$ ，发现两者的杂散串联电感 $C_{0}$ 高压缓冲器二极管显着降低了流经缓冲器的电流幅度。提出了一种新的同轴电容器和缓冲器组件，以提高缓冲器在降低延迟电流方面的有效性。该设计利用同心同轴圆柱之间的高度相互耦合来降低缓冲回路中的总电感。实验结果表明，在电流后期流经放电的总电荷减少了近 40%。虽然改进是显着的，但预计原型结构质量的改进可能会进一步降低后期电流。