Gas Phase Model of Surface Reactions for N₂ Afterglows

The adequacy of the homogeneous gas phase model as a representation of the surface losses of diffusing active particles in gas phase is studied. As an example the recent data obtained for the surface recombination coefficients are reanalyzed. The data were obtained by the application of the breakdown delay times which consists of the measurements of the breakdown delay times td as a function of the afterglow period τ. It was found that for the conditions of our experiment, the diffusion should not be neglected as the final results are significantly different when obtained by approximate gas phase representation and by exact numerical solution to the diffusion equation. While application of the gas phase effective coefficients to represent surface losses gives an error in the value of the recombination coefficient, it reproduces correctly other characteristics such as order of the process which can be obtained from simple fits to the experimental data.