Determination of Plasma Space Potential from a Langmuir Probe by Tikhonov's Regularization Method

An analysis of the accurateness of determining the plasma space potential from the probe current-voltage characteristics have been performed to improve the accurateness of the consequently determining plasma parameters from it. The problem is analyzed as an inverse and ill-posed one. Tikhonov's regularization method was introduced to solve such problem. It was shown that the accurate determination of the plasma potential is the most important for low temperature plasma <1 eV. The method was checked in argon plasma created in the double plasma machine. The satisfactory results were obtained.