On the relevance of superelastic collisions in argon and nitrogen discharges

The role of superelastic collisions in determining the evolution of gas discharges, when the electric field is calculated self-consistently with the gas composition, has been discussed. The test cases consider an argon discharge sustained by applying a given power density profile and a nitrogen discharge generated by a ns pulse in the presence of the circuit resistance. The results show that in both cases superelastic collisions modify the plasma properties already during the discharge, when the population of excited states grows and starts to affect the evolution of the plasma till complete depletion.