Influence of electrode area on the conditioning effect in vacuum

The authors of the original paper [see ibid., vol. 2, no. 2, p. 317-20, 1995] have to be commended for their effort to understand the conditioning phenomenon in vacuum gaps. However, they seem to put particular emphasis in their explanation on the melting of microprotrusions. Previous research in this area showed that conditioning is due to the removal and/or smoothing out of microprotrusions or to adsorption processes. After microprotrusions are removed and/or smoothed out, adsorption processes seem to dominate the conditioning of the electrodes.