Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of the Negative Differential Resistance in a Discharge Plasma

Negative differential resistance effect in the current-voltage characteristic simultaneously with the generation of a fireball in a plasma diode was experimentally evidenced by increasing the voltage applied on a supplementary electrode immersed into plasma. This effect is associated with a bistabilitiy in the frame of a hydrodynamic model by assuming that the electronic component of plasma is non-inertial (while the ionic one is inertial) and that the movements of electrons take place on continuous but non-differentiable curves, i.e., fractal curves.