The glow discharge: an exciting plasma!

Glow discharges are used in a large number of application fields. Their use as a spectroscopic source for analytical chemistry is only one application ; they are much more widely used for other purposes, such as in the micro-e lectronics industry and in materials technology, and also as lasers, variou s kinds of light sources, and in the new upcoming plasma displays. In this review we will give a brief overview of these applications. In order to imp rove the results in these application fields and, in general, to obtain a b etter understanding of the plasma processes, various modeling approaches fo r glow discharges, mainly for the non-analytical applications, have been de scribed in the literature, of which a brief overview will be given here. Fi nally, our own modeling network, which is specifically applied to analytica l glow discharges, will be briefly described and some typical results will be shown.