Mitigation of electron attachment to oxygen in high pressure air plasmas by vibrational excitation

A series of time resolved microwave attenuation measurements are performed of the electron number density of an electron beam generated, CO laser excited nonequilibrium O2∕N2 plasma. Resonant absorption of infrared radiation from the CO laser produces the nonequilibrium state, in which the heavy species vibrational modes are disproportionately excited, compared to the rotational and translational modes (Tvib≈2000–3000K vs TR∕T≈300K). It is shown that this results in an increase in the plasma free electron lifetime by two orders of magnitude compared to the unexcited cold gas, an effect which is ascribed to complete mitigation of rapid three-body electron attachment to molecular oxygen. A series of heavy species filtered pure rotational Raman scattering measurements are also presented, which exhibit minimal temperature change (+50K), indicating that the observed lifetime increase cannot be due to heavy-species thermal effects. Finally, computational modeling results infer an increase in the rate of O2− det...