This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955.

The GEC RF Reference Cell is a parallel plate, capacity-coupled, rf plasma reactor that, in principle, is suitable for studies of basic discharge phenomena, investigation of industrial-type plasmas, and theoretical modeling. This report contains 12 articles that review nearly all of the experiments and theoretical modeling efforts that have been performed over the last 5 years using GEC cells. Together, they serve as a "users' guide" to the operation and performance of the GEC cell.

The research on gaseous electronics reaches back more than 100 years. With the growing importance of gas lasers in so many research and industrial applications as well as power systems generating, transmitting, and distributing huge blocks of electrical power, the body of literature on cross sections, drift and diffusion, and ionization phenomena c

Gaseous Electronics and Gas Lasers deals with the fundamental principles and methods of analysis of weakly ionized gas discharges and gas lasers. The emphasis is on processes occurring in gas discharges and the analytical methods used to calculate important process rates. Detailed analyses of a variety of gas discharges are presented using atomic, ionic, and gas lasers as primary illustrations. Comprised of 12 chapters, this book begins with some initial categorization of gas discharge species and an overview of their interactions. The discussion then turns to an elementary theory of a gas discharge; inelastic collisions; distribution functions and the Boltzmann equation; and transport coefficients. Subsequent chapters focus on the fluid equations; electron-density decay processes; excited species; atomic neutral gas lasers; molecular gas lasers; and ion lasers. The important electron loss processes that determine the behavior of a plasma when the source and loss terms balance are also examined. This monograph will be of value to graduate students, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of physics and engineering, as well as to professionals interested in working with weakly ionized discharges.