Novel effects and instabilities in stationary vacuum diode systems with vertical temperature gradient

Abstract

Recently there has been a rise of interest in studying of physical phenomena occurring in vacuum diode systems, those in thermal scanning tunneling microscopes [1], diodes with a microspacing between the electrodes varying from 10 to 10^5 Å and the temperature gradient 10–10^5 К/Å in particular [2]. The objective of this paper is to model physical actions between electrodes in our diode systems as well as to investigate experimentally nonequilibrium processes of electrons flow, their instabilities included.