Determination of gas discharge plasma potential by Langmuir probe using different methods

In a hollow cathode discharge in helium at reduced pressure, the profile of the plasma potential Up in the cathode-anode region was measured with a single Langmuir probe. A digital technique was used to control and analyze the experimental results. The probe current-voltage characteristic was generated by applying a voltage with a spectrum with an equal probability distribution in the measured voltage range. Three methods were compared: (1) differentiation of the probe current-voltage characteristic (IVC) by the Langmuir-Druyvesteyn (LD) method with the Savitsky-Golay (SG) filter; (2) definition of the position of the noise maximum in the experimental IVC; (3) determination of the voltage corresponding to the intersection of the asymptotes of different range of the IVC. Methods (2) and (3) were used both as alternatives to method (1) for measuring the potential Up and as additional ones when choosing free parameters of the SG filter for plasma diagnostics by method (1).