Abstract
A capillary discharge tube has been used for background lighting of liquid crystal displays and gaseous lasers. In these optical devices, the luminance and spectral characteristics play a very important role and usually depend on discharge conditions such as the tube radius, gas pressures, discharge currents, and the gases used. Furthermore, the optical characteristics of a gas mixture behave in a different manner from those of pure gases. Therefore, it is important to investigate the optical characteristics of gas mixtures for various discharge conditions. In this paper, measurement has been made of the fundamental optical properties of gas mixtures in a cylindrical capillary discharge tube. The gases used were mixtures of He-Ne, He-Ar, and Ne-Ar. The tube used in the measurements was 1 mm in diameter. The discharge current was 20 mA, while gas pressures were varied from 0.2 to 20.0 Torr. The results of the measurements are qualitatively discussed.
