AVS 50th International Symposium
    Plasma Science and Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session PS-TuM

Paper PS-TuM2
Measurement of Electrical Fields Around Dissimilar Materials Exposed to a Discharge

Tuesday, November 4, 2003, 8:40 am, Room 314

Session: Plasma Diagnostics: Processing
Presenter: E.V. Barnat, Sandia National Laboratories
Authors: E.V. Barnat, Sandia National Laboratories
G.A. Hebner, Sandia National Laboratories
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The nature of a surface/plasma boundary can have an important impact on the processes that occur both in the plasma and on the bounding surface. In this work, fluorescence-dip spectroscopy is used to study the surface dependant sheath structure at the boundary of an argon glow discharge. The two laser technique monitors the variation in the fluorescence from an intermediate state caused by laser excitation from this intermediate state to Stark-shifted Rydberg levels sensitive to the electric fields present in the sheath. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the dip-spectroscopy technique, half of a conducting electrode is covered with an insulating surface and both spatially and temporally resolved measurements of the structure of the sheath are made around both the conducting and the non-conducting surfaces. The fields through the sheath above the two surfaces, the potential drops across the sheath, and the fields near the surface along the electrode are discussed for various discharge conditions. Future applications of fluorescence-dip spectroscopy will be discussed as well. @FootnoteText@ This work was supported by the Division of Material Sciences, BES, Office of Science, U. S. Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories, a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company for the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. .