Requirements of the glow discharge techniques to the fundamentals - an exemplary approach

The importance of gaining knowledge on the fundamental processes in glow discharges in the field of the signal generation, the sputtering phenomena taking place in the case of solids and the analyte breakdown in the excitation of gases is treated. For gaining more knowledge on the plasma processes diagnostics including temperature and electron number density as well as gas and analyte atom and ion densities are required. For the sputtering process, it is shown at the hand of measurements with gas-jet enhanced sputtering and magnetically enhanced sputtering that selective sputtering may occur and that the influence of the analyte loading of the glow discharge plasma needs further study. For the case of the introduction of gaseous samples, the analyte distribution as well as the break-down mechanisms and kinetics in the case of molecular species ask for further study as shown by experiments with gas-sampling glow discharges.