Quantitative comparison of rare-gas cold cathode discharge metastable atomic beam sources

Two commonly used cold cathode discharge sources to create rare gas metastable atomic beams are experimentally compared with respect to the output flux and the most probable velocity of the resulting beams. The systems are characterized with the same detection system thereby enabling an unambiguous performance comparison. The results of the experiments show that there is a clear distinction between the output beam characteristics of the beam sources. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.