That's one mighty PCSS you have there, do they give out free samples?
I wish we had. Maybe then someone besides DTRA would have bought one.
This device was discovered in the 1990s by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque, New Mexico. SNL is co-located on Kirtland Air Force Base, home of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. I worked at the Weapons Lab as a contractor for UDRI in the 1970s, as an technician supporting high-energy laser development for the Airborne Laser Laboratory airplane, which is now a moth-balled exhibit at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Last time I looked, the USAF is STILL trying to develop a weapons-grade laser to fit onto airplanes. But I didn't know diddly about SNL at the time, and there was no Internet World Wide Web to educate and inform me.
Turns out that SNL is into all sorts of stuff involving high energy. At one time they built and operated an nuclear EMP simulator constructed on a wooden trestle large enough to drive a B-52 bomber onto... which they did:
SNL is also involved as stewards of the USA nuclear weapon stockpile, along with Laurence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). LLNL played a pivotal role in our development of a
working PCSS whereas SNL spent about ten years in the 1990s
trying to get it to "fire" for more than a few shots before self-destructing. Problem was, once triggered into avalanche conduction, the conductive path was random between the two contacts, very much resembling lightning. The conductive streamers had various widths and current densities and that is what led to the self-destruction. What we did, at the suggestion of DTRA, was to implant oxygen ions in parallel tracks between the contacts. The oxygen ions "poisoned" the GaAs and prevented it from behaving as a photo-conductor. Areas that did not receive oxygen ion implants carried the current streamers within narrow confines between the contacts. We could "see" that this was happening because the GaAs emitted infrared light, created by the current streamers, that could be photographed using a gated CCD camera.
Our partner in all of this was a sub-contractor named L3 Pulse Sciences in San Leandro, California. This was a case of the tail wagging the dog, as L3 is a humongous defense contractor heavily embedded with the Pentagon and Congress. How I was able to get them to sub with UES is another fascinating but longish story, for which I received no credit and very little appreciation. A few years and a couple of DTRA contracts later L3 took a CCD image and e-mailed a copy to me. It showed sixteen (IIRC) parallel conducting tracks on one of the GaAs switches we had fabricated and sent to them for testing. Next thing I know my boss and I are on an airplane to Albuquerque to talk with a bunch of engineers and scientists at SNL. Most of them didn't believe we had done what we said we had done, mainly because we didn't have "theory" for what was going on that agreed with what SNL thought was going on. UES had just been awarded a million dollar "fast track" contract to provide some of these PCSS devices to L3 so they could build a portable, modular, expandable, battery-operated nuclear EMP simulator. Which they did.
L3 finished the simulator about a year later, and that is the last I heard of it, except for signing away to UES any patent rights I might have had. Rabi and I were named as co-inventors on the UES patent application, which was rejected twice by the United States Patent and Trademark Office with the "explanation" that it was based on "prior art." No mention was made that the so-called prior art didn't work until we came along and fixed it.
I tried for two years after that to find another sponsor willing to fund development of our PCSS prototype into a real product, with a specification datasheet, that could be manufactured by or for UES and distributed by the likes of Farnell or DigiKey or even AliBaba. Nada. Dead ends everywhere I looked. UES carried me on overhead at half-time pay during this period before finally "letting me go" with a nice letter saying it wasn't my fault, but if I wanted to seek another job, at age 70, I would be eligible to collect Ohio unemployment compensation while doing so. I finally saw the writing on the wall and accepted retirement to Florida in 2016. Well, except for playing around in this and other forums, just to keep active whatever remaining brain cells I have left.
It is nice finding another person who seeks knowledge "just for the fun of it" as you appear to do.
