Theoretical and experimental investigations of an electric-discharge plasma of an XeCl laser

An electric-discharge plasma formed from an XeCl laser mixture (composition He:Xe:HCl = 920:10:1 pressure 2.2 atm) was investigated by absorption probing with pulses from a tunable dye laser. The experimental time dependences of the concentrations of some of the excited components of the plasma were compared with the results of a calculation based on a model with a system of rate equations for 13 components of the plasma and the Boltzmann equation for the electron energy distribution function. The experimentally determined time dependence of the voltage across the discharge gap was used in this model. A satisfactory description of the experimental results was provided by the model. Some of the plasmachemical reactions occurring in a gas discharge were analyzed.