Abstract
The instability which causes a spatially uniform glow discharge to break up into a number of discrete filaments (and may ultimately result in arc formation) is known to be responsible for the termination of laser output in rare gas halide (RGH) lasers at high specific power input levels. The mechanism which has been most widely discussed in the previous literature1-3 is the so-called ionization instability in which stepwise ionization of neutral metastable species was identified as the cause of a runaway increase in electron density. These theoretical perturbative treatments were developed to explain the instability observed in electron beam-sustained devices. Both the global nature of the instability described by these perturbative treatments and the inclusion of an electron density generating source term from the e-beam generally render the analysis inapplicable to self-sustained discharge devices. In particular, the spatially uniform distribution of the halogen donor density is an implicit assumption for which there is no adequate justification.
© 1985 Optical Society of America
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