Stability of a glow discharge plasma in a variable electric field

The effects are studied of a variable (rotating, high-frequency, etc.) electric field on the development of ionization-vibrational instability, which is one of the possible causes for the appearance of filaments in a glow discharge in molecule gases. It is shown that in a variable field there are two effective spatial mechanisms for suppressing instability. The first is associated with three-dimensional rotations of the field vector, the second is based on large changes of the electron temperature in an electric field of varying amplitude.