Abstract
An experimental study of plasma decay in the afterglow of a high-voltage nanosecond discharge in ethane:argon mixtures was performed under conditions when the mean electron energy significantly exceeded the mean energy of neutral particles at room temperature and pressures from 2 to 10 Torr. Electrons were heated during the plasma decay (i) by retarding electron thermalization through a strong dilution of the hydrocarbon with argon and (ii) by the application of an additional external electric field. Using the microwave interferometer, the temporal evolution of the electron density during plasma decay was studied in the range from 5 × 1010 to 3 × 1012 cm−3. The analysis of the experimental data allowed us to obtain the dependence of the effective recombination coefficients of electrons with hydrocarbon ions on the electron temperature. A simplified kinetic scheme was proposed for the description of electron and ion reactions during the plasma decay for our experimental conditions. Calculations on the basis of this scheme showed that the plasma decay is controlled by the dissociative recombination of molecular and cluster hydrocarbon ions.
Published Version
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