Recombination of a Xenon Plasma Jet

As pointed out in a previous paper, stable spherical plasma configurations can be produced by pulsed injection of a plasma into an ambient gas. It is shown here that the observed long plasma lifetime of several milliseconds is in agreement with collisional‐radiative recombination theories. We used the modified diffusion approximation by Biberman et al. involving thermal non‐equilibrium, recombination heating of electrons, heat conduction, radiation and other details. Under the assumption of a pure xenon plasma, the calculated plasma lifetime is even longer than the observed one. This discrepancy can be explained by the presence of molecules and turbulent mixing with the outer gas, which are not considered in the recombination calculation.