Ectons in high power charged particle accelerators

It has been shown that there are many ways of energy concentration in cathode microvolumes of up to 10⁴ Jig, which lead to microexplosions accompanied by electron emission. The process lasts not longer than 9–10 seconds and then ceases. If the current exceeds a threshold value, the process becomes self-sustaining. The phenomenon is named “ecton”. The threshold current value corresponds to a certain critical mass of the material exploded. Assuming that the Joule radius is equal to the radius of thermal conductivity, the paper presents a simple model of the ecton.