Hybridation of electrical, chemical kinetics and particle models for numerical study of XeCl laser discharges

Discharge pumped XeCl lasers are very convenient sources of high radiative power useful for many industrial and medical applications. So numerous codes, devoted to numerical modeling of excimer laser, are available in the literature. The aim of this paper is to present an hybrid model to study the plasma characteristics of XeCl laser impulsional discharge in Ne-Xe-HCl mixture. This model is a coupling of electric circuit equations (electric model), electron Boltzmann equation (particle model) and kinetic equations of both charged particles and the main neutral or excited species (chemical kinetics model). This hybrid model presents some specificity and originality for each part of the model (kinetic, particle and electric). The particle model is based on a powerful iterative solution of non linear electron Boltzmann equation including the main processes involved in the discharge plasma (inelastic, superelastic, Coulomb collisions, dissociation, attachment, ionization Penning, recombination). The chemical kinetics model including vibrational states is based on a powerful numerical scheme valid for stiff equations and for any kind of interactions whatever its time scale or the magnitude of its rate coefficient. The electrical circuit model is modular enough to take into account any kind of electric circuit including equivalent impedance of discharge for several cases of number of loops of the network (1 or 2 or 3 or more)