Dynamics of a plasma panel discharge: Current waveform and optical emission

We have studied the current waveform as well as the time- and spectrally-resolved optical emission from a monochrome ac plasma display panel as a function of driving voltage. The voltage driver provided a 18 ns risetime pulse which allowed for a clean separation between the displacement current pulse, similar to 25 ns wide, and the discharge pulse. The commercial panel was specially filled with pure Pie to facilitate comparisons with numerical modeling of the discharge based on relatively new computational procedures which are applied to a local-field approximation for the plasma. The delay in the discharge pulse and the light emission at 668 nm (3d D-1-->2p P-1), ranges from similar to 100 ns just above the sustain threshold (+/-110V) to similar to 30 ns at higher voltage +/-150 V).