New marker for determining the degree of inhomogeneity of capacitive and barrier discharges

A new thermodynamic approach to estimating the degree of nonuniformity of filling of the excimer lamp bulb with the discharge plasma is proposed for refining the results of numerical simulation of generation of radiation in the excilamp plasmas. It is shown that the thermal power of the discharge in a capacitive-discharge XeCl excilamp is proportional to the discharge filling factor. For a barrier-discharge XeCl excilamp, it is shown that the discrepancy between the efficiencies obtained by numerical simulation of an “ideal” discharge system and in the experiment can be explained taking into account the discharge filling factor of the cuvette.