Publications

Electrostatic Relativistic Fluid Models of Electron Emission in a Warm Diode

Hamlin, Nathaniel D.; Smith, Thomas M.; Roberds, Nicholas R.; Glines, Forrest W.; Beckwith, Kristian B.

A semi-analytic fluid model has been developed for characterizing relativistic electron emission across a warm diode gap. Here we demonstrate the use of this model in (i) verifying multi-fluid codes in modeling compressible relativistic electron flows (the EMPIRE-Fluid code is used as an example; see also Ref. 1), (ii) elucidating key physics mechanisms characterizing the influence of compressibility and relativistic injection speed of the electron flow, and (iii) characterizing the regimes over which a fluid model recovers physically reasonable solutions.