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Contamination Effects On Fixed-Bias Langmuir Probes, C.T. Steigies, Aroh Barjatya

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Langmuir probes are standard instruments for plasma density measurements on many sounding rockets. These probes can be operated in swept-bias as well as in fixed-bias modes. In swept-bias Langmuir probes, contamination effects are frequently visible as a hysteresis between consecutive up and down voltage ramps. This hysteresis, if not corrected, leads to poorly determined plasma densities and temperatures. With a properly chosen sweep function, the contamination parameters can be determinedfromthemeasurementsandcorrectplasmaparameterscanthenbedetermined.Inthispaper, we study the contamination effects on fixed-bias Langmuir probes, where no hysteresis type effect is seen in the data. Even though the contamination is not evident from the measurements, it …