Contribution to studies on hollow cathode discharges

The electron temperature measured in a hollow cathode by the optogalvanic method, discloses the fact that at lower gas pressure (order 100 Pa) its value is of the order of 0.1 eV, not sufficient to sustain the discharge. The role of high energy electrons, that are responsible for maintaining of the discharge in such cases, was investigated. A simple Monte Carlo simulation, based on the concept of beam electrons, containing only the most important processes has been applied in order to obtain the population of the two lowest excited states of neon. At the same time, the energy distribution of high energy electrons was obtained. The results of calculated densities of 1 s 5 and 1 s 4 neon atom states were found to be in a favourable agreement with values measured by the laser induced fluorescence method.