A microwave hairpin resonance probe for measuring electron density dynamics in laser ablation plasmas (original) (raw)

Time evolution of electron density in a laser ablation plume has been investigated using a floating hairpin resonance probe in conjunction with the ion density measured using a planar Langmuir probe. The laser plasma plume is produced by ablation of silver using a 248 nm, 26 ns, KrF, YiG laser. Due to supersonic flow of ions in the plume; measuring the electron density is difficult using a Langmuir probe, because of energetic ions bombarding the probes surface. Therefore we used a floating hairpin resonance probe for measuring time varying electron density of the plume. This technique depends only on the local electron density and is independent of the ion fluxes received by the probe. The ion density on the other hand is simply obtained from the ion flux and ion flight-time measure to a negatively biased probe, at some distance from the target. We observe a good agreement between the electron and ion density measured using two distinct techniques.

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