3-D temperature measurement of transient plasma during semiconductor bridge electroburst with high-speed interferometry

•Successful combination of interferometry and high-speed photography.•First real-time and complete recording of the electroburst of a semiconductor bridge(SCB).•Three-dimensional imaging of transient fields.•Spatial characteristics of plasma generated by SCB satisfy axisymmetric dist-ribution. A high-speed technique for three-dimensional (3-D) imaging of dynamic transient temperature field using single-shot off-axis interferometry is proposed. The sequence of interferograms, which contain temperature parameters of plasma, is obtained with using a Mach-Zender interferometer system and high-speed photography. The interferograms were processed using the Fourier transform and the Abel algorithm, to extract the refractive index distribution. Subsequently, the radial and 3-D distribution of temperature were derived with G-D equation. In experiments, transient process less than 100μs during plasma electroburst was successful captured at a frame rate of 3 × 106 fps. The 3-D temperature and its variations during the whole process in a SCB ignition was clearly revealed for the first time.