Development of a high voltage sealed of gas discharge switch

High voltage multi-gap gas discharge switches are very important tools for pulsed power applications in accelerator laboratories. They have applications for example in driving fast injectionand extraction magnets and beam dumps. Basically, there are two different principles used to realise a high voltage switch. One is based on the use of several semiconductor switches, and the other is based on a triggered breakdown in gases or in vacuum. We introduce in this report a new type of high voltage gas discharge switch, which consists of multi-gap coaxial electrode geometry. Initially the inner electrode serves as anode, the outer electrodes as voltage divider for the applied high voltage. This switching device is called, based on its underlying effect, a multi-gap Lorentz Drift Switch (multi-gap LDS). For the initial investigations a two-gap LDS was designed (Fig.1).