Saturation Ion Currents to Langmuir Probes

Abstract

The parabolic variation of saturation ion current with probe potential observed in dense plasmas is fortuitous and is not directly related to the effects of orbital motion. Agreement between measured and computed saturation ion characteristics is illustrated. The discussion is in the framework of collisionless, magnetic‐field‐free theories; they apply to the experiments only if the ion Larmor radius is much larger than the probe radius.