Penning transfer in argon-based gas mixtures

Penning transfers, a group of processes by which excitation energy is used to ionise the gas, increase the gas gain in some detectors. Both the probability that such transfers occur and the mechanism by which the transfer takes place, vary with the gas composition and pressure. With a view to developing a microscopic electron transport model that takes Penning transfers into account, we use this dependence to identify the transfer mechanisms at play. We do this for a number of argon-based gas mixtures, using gain curves from the literature.