Plasma diagnostics of arc-enhanced glow discharge

The plasma generated by an arc-enhanced glow discharge is applicable to various surface treatments. Ton cleaning procedures are mostly carried out in argon or argon plus hydrogen gas mixtures before other treatments are made. Possible treatments are nitriding before deposition of a hard coating and deposition of hard carbon coatings. The paper presents Langmuir probe measurements and the results of optical emission spectroscopy (OES). It is shown that the wide-range OES measurements (300-800 nm) can be used to record sensitively variations of plasma states. The following plasmas were investigated: argon, argon plus hydrogen, argon plus nitrogen and argon plus nitrogen and acetylene. The plasma distribution was measured near and in the space between two circular saw blades.