Abstract
Ideas developed in problems of high-field electron transport in semiconductors have been extended to the case of gases. It is shown that nonlinearities in the electric current may occur at drift velocities comparable with the velocity of sound in the gas. This is in agreement with the recent experiments of Gee and Freeman on methane. Drift velocities much larger than the velocity of sound are needed for the nonlinearities to appear if the collisions are inelastic.

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