Herkunft des Nachleuchtens in einer gepulsten Argonentladung

Long-Lived Levels in Multiply and Highly Charged Ions

“…The delayed ultraviolet (UV) emission of some of the contaminants of the discharge gas (such as residual water vapor) has been connected with energy stored by long-lived excited levels (presumably of Ar), which transfer their excitation collisionally to other atoms and molecules (see discussion in [4]). If the density of such metastable atoms is sufficiently high, it should happen that pairs of them collide, and with a certain probability their excitation energies might be reshuffled so that one or both atoms end up in one of the short-lived levels, and then the atoms can decay radiatively.…”