Preliminary Investigation on a Sheet Plasma Produced by a Single Hot-Filament Cathode Discharge

摘要

A sheet plasma is generated by a mesh anode and a single hot-filament cathode witha DC power supply, and its characteristics are experimentally investigated. The sheet plasma isobserved to locate around the anode. Both electron density and electron temperature derivedfrom the average energy of the energetic electrons in nitrogen are estimated to be 10~8 cm^(-3) and20～40 eV, respectively, using the optical emission spectroscopy (OES) method based on a kineticmodel of low-pressure nitrogen discharge. The electron density, electron temperature and theirspatial distributions are found to be affected by the supplying voltage on the anode(70 V to300 V), filament temperature (600℃ to 780℃) and gas pressure (2 Pa to 20 Pa). By adjustingthese parameters the discharge status can be easily controlled.