Continuous heatable Langmuir probe for flowing afterglow measurements

A heatable Langmuir probe consisting of a continuous dc-heating-current loop of tungsten wire is presented. This technique is efficient to keep the probe surface clean for flowing afterglow measurements. In our experimental conditions , the perturbations on the electron density determination can be considered as very small. The measurement of the well-known rate for the dissociative recombination of O2+ shows that the gas surrounding the probe is not heated for estimated probe temperature up to 700 K .