Excimer Emission From Pulsed Microhollow Cathode Discharges

Microhollow cathode discharges (MHCDs) are direct current, high-pressure, non-equilibrium gas discharges. Direct current MHCDs in xenon and argon have shown to emit excimer radiation at 172 and 127 nm, respectively. Internal efficiency of excimer emission in DC MHCD was measured to be 6–9% in xenon, and 1–6%, depending on the gas flow rate in argon. This high efficiency is due to the high rate of rare gas excitation by electrons accelerated in the cathode fall and to subsequent three-body collisions in the high-pressure gas. The excimer power scales linearly with current; however, due to the increasing size of the source with increasing current, the radiant emittance and the current density stay constant at 1.5 W/cm2 and 0.3 A/cm 2, respectively, at 400 Torr xenon. In DC operation, the current was limited to 8 mA to avoid thermal damage of the electrodes. In order to explore the discharge physics and the excimer emission at higher currents, the discharge was pulsed with a duty cycle of 0.0007. This allowed us to increase the peak power and current without increasing the average power. A discharge behavior different from the DC and quasi DC (ms pulsed) was observed when the pulse was reduced to values in the order of the electron relaxation time. For argon this is in the order of 36 ns at atmospheric pressure. Pulsing the discharge with such short pulses allows for heating the electrons without heating the gas. Applying electrical pulses of 20 ns duration to direct current MHCDs in xenon increased the excimer emission exponentially with the pulse voltage by more than two orders of magnitude over the DC value. At 750 V pulse voltage, an output VUV optical power of 2.75 W and internal efficiency of 20% was measured. Pulsing MHCDs in argon with a 10 ns pulse increased the intensity by a factor of six but the efficiency was not increased beyond the DC value. Electron density measurements using the Stark effect showed that the increase in excimer intensity was due to the increase in electron density and the increased electron energy caused by pulsed electron heating

Calculation of Generalized Polynomial-Chaos Basis Functions and Gauss Quadrature Rules in Hierarchical Uncertainty Quantification

Stochastic spectral methods are efficient techniques for uncertainty quantification. Recently they have shown excellent performance in the statistical analysis of integrated circuits. In stochastic spectral methods, one needs to determine a set of orthonormal polynomials and a proper numerical quadrature rule. The former are used as the basis functions in a generalized polynomial chaos expansion. The latter is used to compute the integrals involved in stochastic spectral methods. Obtaining such information requires knowing the density function of the random input {\it a-priori}. However, individual system components are often described by surrogate models rather than density functions. In order to apply stochastic spectral methods in hierarchical uncertainty quantification, we first propose to construct physically consistent closed-form density functions by two monotone interpolation schemes. Then, by exploiting the special forms of the obtained density functions, we determine the generalized polynomial-chaos basis functions and the Gauss quadrature rules that are required by a stochastic spectral simulator. The effectiveness of our proposed algorithm is verified by both synthetic and practical circuit examples.Comment: Published by IEEE Trans CAD in May 201

Argon excimer emission from high-pressure microdischarges in metal capillaries

We report on argon excimer emission from high-pressure microdischarges formed inside metal capillaries with or without gas flow. Excimer emission intensity from a single tube increases linearly with gas pressure between 400 and 1000 Torr. Higher discharge current also results in initial intensity gains until gas heating causes saturation or intensity drop. Argon flow through the discharge intensifies emission perhaps by gas cooling. Emission intensity was found to be additive in prealigned dual microdischarges, suggesting that an array of microdischarges could produce a high-intensity excimer source

Excimer Emission From Cathode Boundary Layer Discharges

The excimer emission from direct current glow discharges between a planar cathode and a ring-shaped anode of 0.75 and 1.5 mm diameter, respectively, separated by a gap of 250 μm, was studied in xenon and argon in a pressure range from 75 to 760 Torr. The thickness of the “cathode boundary layer” plasma, in the 100 μm range, and a discharge sustaining voltage of approximately 200 V, indicates that the discharge is restricted to the cathode fall and the negative glow. The radiant excimer emittance at 172 nm increases with pressure and reaches a value of 4 W/cm2 for atmospheric pressure operation in xenon. The maximum internal efficiency, however, decreases with pressure having highest values of 5% for 75 Torr operation. When the discharge current is reduced below a critical value, the discharge in xenon changes from an abnormal glow into a mode showing self-organization of the plasma. Also, the excimer spectrum changes from one with about equal contributions from the first and second continuum to one that is dominated by the second continuum emission. The xenon excimer emission intensity peaks at this discharge mode transition. In the case of argon, self-organization of the plasma was not seen, but the emission of the excimer radiation (128 nm) again shows a maximum at the transition from abnormal to normal glow. As was observed with xenon, the radiant emittance of argon increases with pressure, and the efficiency decreases. The maximum radiant emittance is 1.6 W/cm2 for argon at 600 Torr. The maximum internal efficiency is 2.5% at 200 Torr. The positive slope of the current–voltage characteristics at maximum excimer emission in both cases indicates the possibility of generating intense, large area, flat excimer lamps