![]() ![]() The heating coil heats up the electrode to mobilize the electrons and the high voltage generator (usually just a resonant LC pump) creates enough voltage for the initial 'spark' to ignite the bulb. One way to make electrons more mobile and likely to shoot off the cathode is to heat it up, and this is what a so-called 'starter' circuit does: it is essentially nothing more than a high voltage generator and a heating coil. So, in order to function, it is vitally important for these lights to have a lot of 'free' electrons available to shoot at the mercury. ![]() These UV photons then hit the phosphor-based coating on the inside of the glass tube, which converts these UV photons to visible white light. In this vacuum is mercury vapour, and when the electron hits a mercury atom, that Hg atom goes into an excited state and outputs one or more photons of UV light upon decay. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this question is valuable from the point of view of electronic design, as it pertains to some fundamental understanding on how fluorescent lights work.įluorescent lights work by accelerating electrons from the cathode to the anode in an almost-vacuum environment.
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