Decay of a plasma produced by a pulsed beam of accelerated electrons in an He-Ne mixture at high pressure

Increased interest has recently been shown in the low-temperature plasma produced by the action of electron beams on dense gases. This interest is due to the possibility of investigating plasma-chemical reactions in highly nonequilibrium conditions [1] and also to the prospect of introducing new methods of pumping gas lasers: by recombination [12], charge transfer [3], the formation of complex compounds [4, 5], etc. The plasma in question is characterized by high rates of reactions involving charged and neutral particles, which largely accounts for the difficulty of investigating such a plasma experimentally. For instance, problems of determining the kind of ions predominating in the plasma, the mechanism of recombination decay, the nature of the luminescence on individual spectral transitions, etc., become nontrivial. In this paper we investigate the decay of a plasma in neon and in an He-Ne mixture at high gas pressure.