Stability of an extended glow discharge used to excite large volumes of rapidly flowing laser gas mixtures

In order to excite uniformly large volumes of gas, electrical discharges must be stable with respect to local fluctuations. In the present paper, a general approach to the stability analysis of such self-sustained discharges is proposed in which allowance is made for the role of the cathode layer which defines the lower bound of self-sustainment. The approach is applied to an analysis of rapid 'ionization' and slow 'molecular' instabilities. The role of the electron temperature is noted. The analysis leads to simple criteria which make is possible to identify both stable modes and the stability regions of a discharge on the basis of the general nature of the physical processes involved.