Spectroscopic investigation of the ionization kinetics in XeCl laser discharges by Xe* density measurements

Time and spatially resolved absorption measurements of Xe^* particle number densities performed at an X-ray preionized self-sustained XeCl^*-laser discharge were used to investigate the reaction kinetics of such discharges and to test the validity of the commonly-made assumption that they are fit well by spatially homogeneous numerical models. It turned out that the Xe^* density distribution over the discharge cross section remains homogeneous for less than 100 ns only. Comparing the experimental results of the homogeneous discharge phase with zero-dimensional model calculations, we conclude that induced emission modeled using two excited xenon levels must be taken into account for the quantitative interpretation of the absorption measurements. For the interpretation of the Xe 6s-6p absorption measurements even a multilevel model will be necessary. Further we conclude from the relative courses and the absolute values of the Xe^* particle number densities that realistic HCl kinetics should contain three vibrationally excited levels and stepwise excitation processes as proposed by Dem'yanov et al. 8].