“…Due to the absence of a hot electrode, the plasma cathode system is basically more reliable, with a longer life time, and can generate electron beams at much higher background gas pressure, even in the fore-vacuum pressure range. A characteristic feature of this type of discharge is the generation of distinctive electron beams, before and at the time of voltage collapse [7][8][9][10]. These high-power high-brightness electron beams [11] were successfully tested for applications such as thin-film deposition, plasma processing, intense pulsed charged particle sources, and X-ray sources [12].…”