Glow pause in a helium plasma at room and liquid nitrogen temperatures on applying a nanosecond voltage pulse to a glow discharge

The features of the relaxation of a quasi-steady glow discharge after extra excitation by a nanosecond high-voltage pulse are studied experimentally. It is shown that the plasma relaxation is characterized by the existence of a time interval with a low emission intensity--a glow pause. A kinetic model of the helium plasma relaxation is developed. It is shown that the nanosecond discharge that creates extra ionization and metastable atoms enables one to keep the electron temperature at a quasi-steady level within the range 0.05-0.5 eV for several hundred microseconds during the glow pause. The effect of the helium temperature on the glow pause features is investigated