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With the growing importance of advanced lighting technologies, customers expect additional functionality and higher comfort from fluorescent lamps. However, the ability to regulate light intensity (dimmed operation), in particular, exerts enormous stress on fluorescent lamps’ electrodes, leading to increased electrode erosion and significantly reduced lifetimes. During the operation of a fluorescent lamp, free barium (the main compound of the electrode emitter) is produced at the electrode responsible for lowering the work function in order to enable energy-efficient and durable electrodes with lifetimes of up to 20,000 hours. Despite their relatively long lifetimes, electrodes remain the lifetime-limiting factor of a fluorescent lamp. Therefore, for practical applications (e.g., maintaining quality control, adjusting operational parameters, and evaluating new electrode designs), electrode erosion is of special interest. The actual erosion-measurement methods determine a time-averaged erosion level over several hundred operation hours. Thus, a quasi-instantaneous measuring method (short measurement) is still necessary to determine erosion during operation. Such a method would allow us to compare erosion under different discharge conditions (currents, frequencies, or heating currents) from the same electrode in the same lamp. This work focuses on the determination of absolute electrode erosion during the stationary operation of commonly used fluorescent lamps. Commercial T8 lamps (fluorescent lamps with a diameter of 8/8 inch) are investigated at the operating mode of commonly used electronic ballasts with frequencies of several kHz. Operations under standard and dimmed conditions with an additional heating current to reduce electrode erosion are investigated. Electrode erosion is characterized by the erosion of barium, the main compound of the electrode. Therefore, laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), which is the most sensitive method for this application, is applied to determine the absolute densities of the eroded barium in the electrode region. These densities are affected by the plasma in the electrode region and do not directly represent the absolute barium erosion. To overcome this limitation, a new method based on a special measurement technique in combination with a barium-diffusion-model is developed to determine the absolute barium erosion based on the measured densities. It has been found that the barium densities in the electrode region are lower than the equilibrium pressures produced by the reduction of the barium oxide. This could be caused either by a reduced reaction rate, the reduced diffusion of the reactant (primarily barium oxide) or by reduced barium transport through the porous emitter. However, these results suggest that barium erosion depends on temperature and emitter structure, which vary over an electrode’s lifetime. For currents significantly higher than the nominal lamp current, a drastic increase in emitter evaporation is found. Such, an increase in the lamp current from 300 mA to 500 mA leads to an increase in emitter evaporation by a factor of five. Using the lamp for a long period of time under these conditions therefore reduces the lifetime by a factor of five. Notably, at this dramatically increased erosion level, the hot spot temperature only increases from 1120 K to 1170 K. Investigation of various frequencies from 50 Hz to 5 kHz revealed no significant dependence of emitter evaporation on frequency.
The laser-matter interaction is a topic of current research. In this context, the interaction of intensive laser radiation with atomic clusters is of special interest. Du to the small cluster size, the laser field can penetrate the whole cluster volume, which leads to a high absorption of energy in the cluster. As a result, plasmas with high density and high temperature are produced. In the early phase of the laser-cluster interaction, free electrons are initially created in the cluster due to tunnel ionization or photoionization. Via collisions of these electrons with the cluster atoms, the ionization is increased and thus a dense nanoplasma is produced, which is heated by the laser. If free electrons leave the cluster during the laser-cluster interaction (outer ionization), a positive charge buildup is created. The associated charge repulsion finally can lead to the fragmentation of the cluster due to Coulomb explosion. Experimentally, interesting phenomena emerging from laser-excited clusters are observed, e.g., the creation of fast electrons, the production of highly charged ions, and X-ray emission. In this dissertation, the interaction of Gaussian laser pulses in the infrared regime with argon and xenon clusters is simulated by means of a nanoplasma model. Considering laser intensities in the non-relativistic regime, the relevant processes such as ionization, heating and expansion are theoretically described in this model with a set of coupled rate equations and hydrodynamic equations. One focus of the thesis is on the heating of the nanoplasma via inverse bremsstrahlung (IB), which is due to the absorption of laser photons in electron-ion collisions. In particular, the important question is investigated whether the consideration of the ionic structure – that means, the nuclear charge and the bound electrons – modifies the electron-ion collisions and thus the IB heating rate. Starting from a quantum statistical description, effective electron-ion potentials are used which account for both the screening due to the dense plasma and the inner ionic structure. Within the quantum mechanical first Born approximation, the consideration of the ionic structure leads to a drastic increase of the IB heating rate, in particular for high nuclear charges and low ionic charge states. However, for the parameters relevant in experiments, the applicability of the first Born approximation is questionable. Therefore, quantum mechanical calculations going beyond the first-order perturbation theory are performed. In addition, the IB heating rate is investigated with different classical methods. These are based either on transport cross sections for elastic electron-ion scattering or on classical simulations of inelastic scattering processes. Also within the classical approaches, the consideration of the ionic structure leads to an increase of the heating rate. However, this increase is shown to be only moderate. In a further part, the thesis focuses on the question how the dynamics of the laser-cluster interaction is influenced by the consideration of excited states. This is explored exemplarily for argon clusters excited by single or double laser pulses. The consideration of excitation processes in the nanoplasma leads to a decrease of the electron temperature and to an increase of the density of free electrons. Moreover, it is shown that the consideration of excitation processes results in an essential acceleration of the ionization dynamics. As a consequence, the mean ionic charge state in the plasma as well as the number of highly charged ions is significantly increased. For the population of ground states and excited states within an ionic charge state Z, collisional deexcitation processes play an important role. By means of an analytical relation between excitation and deexcitation cross sections, the rates for the respective processes in the presence of the laser field are calculated. The role of deexcitation processes is studied in detail, showing that the inclusion of these processes is essential for the correct theoretical description of the photon emission from laser-excited clusters. Based on these results, the photon yield is calculated for selected radiative transitions resulting from highly charged argon ions in the UV and X-ray regime.
In der Frequenz kontinuierlich veränderbare Laser sind interessante Lichtquellen für wissenschaftliche Forschung, Industrie und Technik. In diesem Zusammenhang zeigen insbesondere Diodenlaser mit externem Resonator (ECDL) vorteilhafte Eigenschaften. Weit verbreitet ist der Littrow-Laser, da er aufgrund seines einfachen Designs kostengünstig, kompakt und robust ist und zudem eine geringe Linienbreite aufweist. Das bei ihm eingesetzte Reflexions-Gitter fungiert gleichzeitig als Reflektor und Frequenzfilter. Die Durchstimmung erfolgt mechanisch durch Drehung des Gitters mittels eines Piezo-Aktuators. Diese Vorgehensweise begrenzt sowohl die erreichbare Repetitionsrate als auch Durchstimmbereich und -geschwindigkeit. Um diese Probleme zu umgehen, bietet sich der Einsatz zweier akusto-optischer Modulatoren (AOM) als Deflektor im externen Resonator an. Die Durchstimmung eines solchen AOM-Lasers erfolgt durch Ablenkung des Strahls auf rein nicht-mechanischem Weg. Dazu ist allerdings eine geeignete Ansteuerung der AOMs vonnöten. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde ein theoretisches Modell entworfen, welches grundlegende Eigenschaften eines AOM-Lasers beschreibt. Darauf basierend konnte ein Algorithmus zur Berechnung der für eine kontinuierliche Durchstimmung notwendigen AOM-Ansteuersignale entwickelt werden. Dieses Modell zeigt zudem, dass zur Realisierung einer Durchstimmung mit gleichzeitig akzeptabler Laser-Linienbreite hohe Anforderungen an die Ansteuerelektronik, insbesondere bezüglich Jitterfreiheit (< 5 ps), gestellt werden, was nur durch eine vollständig digitale Erzeugung der Ansteuersignale mittels sogenannter DDS-ICs (Direct-Digital-Synthesis) erfüllt werden kann. Andere untersuchte Schaltungen zeigten schlechtere Eigenschaften. Aufgrund der guten Übereinstimmung zwischen dem aufgestellten Modell und dem praktischen AOM-Laseraufbau können im roten Spektralbereich kontinuierliche (modensprungfreie) Durchstimmbereiche von bis zu 220 GHz erreicht werden. Die maximale Durchstimmgeschwindigkeit liegt 1.5 GHz/µs. Eine Repetitionsrate von 25 kHz ist realisierbar. Die 0.2-ms-Linienbreite liegt bei 450 kHz. Der Laser konnte außerdem in einem Bereich von 6 nm (4 THz) ohne mechanische Nachjustage operieren. Eine genaue Analyse zeigt, dass trotz der schon sehr guten Performance des Lasersystems durch Verfeinerung des Modells und eine weitere Verbesserung der Komponenten die genannten Leistungsparameter um einen Faktor 5 - 10 gesteigert werden könnten.