Electron beams: partially flat solutions of a nonlinear elliptic equation with a singular absorption term

Abstract

In the so-called Child-Langmuir law, established since 1911, an electron beam is formed linking two electrodes, which are assumed to be two parallel plates of area $A$, separated to a finite distance $D.$ When $% D\ll \sqrt{A},$ \textquotedblleft edge effects\textquotedblright\ are negligible and the modelling is reduced to a nonlinear boundary problem for a singular ordinary differential equation\ in which a constant coefficient (the generated electric current $j$) must be found in order to get simultaneously Dirichlet and Neumann homogeneous boundary conditions in one of the extremes. If $D>\sqrt{A},$ then the problem becomes much more difficult since the \textquotedblleft edge effects\textquotedblright\ arise in the plane $(x,y)$ and the electric current (now $j(x)$ due to the presence of a very large perpendicular magnetic field) must be determined in order to get solutions $u(x,y)$ of a singular semilinear equation which are partially flat ($u=\frac{\partial u}{\partial n}=0$ on a part of the boundary). In this paper, we offer a rigorous mathematical treatment of some former studies (Joel Lebowitz and Alexander Rokhenko (2003) and Alexander Rokhenko (2006)), where several open questions were left open: for instance, the need for a singularity of $j(x)$ near the cathode edge to get such partially flat solutions.