A semi-automatic system for the analysis of double-probe measurements in a steady state plasma

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Abstract
The authors describe a system suitable for the measurement of electron temperatures in the range 0.1-10 eV and densities of the order of 1015 m-3, consisting of a computer-controlled data acquisition system with off-line data analysis. For the latter stage the authors have developed an algorithm based on curve-fitting techniques to extract the required information in the presence of significant departures from the expected hyperbolic tangent form for the probe characteristic, including in particular the non-zero slope and curvature of the 'saturation' parts of the curve which occur when the probe size is comparable to the Debye length. The authors have tested the system by comparing the results with temperatures obtained by other methods, and have used it in a survey of the temperature and density distributions in the UMIST quadrupole.