Streamer Discharges in the Atmosphere of Primordial Earth

Ammonia Photolysis and the Greenhouse Effect in the Primordial Atmosphere of the Earth

Photochemical calculations indicate that in the prebiotic atmosphere of the Earth ammonia would have been irreversibly converted to N2 in less than 40 years if the ammonia surface mixing ratio were _~10 -4. However, if a continuous outgassing of ammonia were maintained, radiative equilibrium calculations indicate that a surface mixing ratio of ammonia of 10 -5 or greater would provide a suffici...

Streamer discharges can move perpendicularly to the electric field

Streamer discharges are a primary mode of electric breakdown in thunderstorms and high voltage technology; they are generally believed to grow along electric field lines. However, we here give experimental and numerical evidence that streamers can propagate nearly perpendicularly to the background electric field. These streamers are guided by pre-ionization that is orders of magnitude lower tha...

Electron Transport Data in N2-o2 Streamer Plasma Discharges

A multi-term theory for solving the Boltzmann equation and a Monte Carlo simulation technique are used to investigate the electron transport in mixtures of molecular nitrogen and oxygen. We investigate the way in which the transport coefficients and spatially resolved transport data are influenced by the amount of O2 in the mixture. This study was initiated in order to obtain the transport data...

Production of runaway electrons by negative streamer discharges

Primordial Noble Gas in the Earth