Hank Mills wrote: My guess is that for the sparks what would work best is high voltage low current longitudinal impulses. You would want the spark to be as high powered as possible for the very shortest duration.





One of the best and most well vetted ways to accomplish this is with a Blumlein (named after radar developer and polymath, Alan Dower Blumlein, Brit, around WWII). This can take several forms but for UV lasers written up in the Amateur Scientist section of Scientific American, one has a spark gap triggered discharge stored across a capacitive pair of conductive (Cu) plates insulated by the best dielectric available (best are PTFE, but thin two sided conventional circuit board is fine). The discharges are in the low 10s of nanoseconds, the potential differentials are on the order of several thousand volts (breakdown of the two sided circuit board often used). The Blumlein can also take the form of a spark-gap shorted coaxial transmission line, sometimes referred to as a drop-dead line. Once one becomes familiar with the technology, it can be morphed into a variety of forms.... the common element being very high peak power and very rapid discharges. They can be set to repeatedly discharge and recharge on quite a rapid basis. The advantage there being that whatever threshold power is necessary to accomplish the electronic (or nuclear?) transitions of interest can be repeatedly reached without having the average power burn out the whole system. The peak powers can easily reach giga watt levels on the bench due to the extremely short (~10 ns) duration of the discharges. Your discharge times are set by the length of the transmission line / channel plates--- that is 30 cm are about one nanosecond.