Conduction characteristics of photoconductive semiconductor switches based on high power laser diodes

The characteristics of photoconductive semiconductor switches (PCSSs), based on laser diodes, are introduced in this paper, including the scheme and some finals in the experiments. This kind of switch may be used in the dielectric wall accelerator (DWA). The pulsed laser triggering the PCSS has the wavelength, full width at half maximum (FWHM), rise-time, and peak power of 905 nm, 20 ns, 3.1 ns and 90 W, respectively. The switch we used in the experiment is an opposed-contact GaAs photoconductive semiconductor switch. The electrode gap is 5 mm, and when the bias pulsed voltage is between 15 kV and 22 kV, the switch works in the nonlinear mode. The measured least closing resistance is 4.1 , root mean square (RMS) jitter is less than 1 ns, and the average life-time of PCSSs is approximately 200 shots under 18 kV bias pulsed voltage.