Novel high-resolved spectroscopic studies of DC positive streamer corona. II. Theoretical background and analysis

We have developed a fully self-consistent method of diagnostics of streamer discharge plasmas based on the analysis of absolute intensities of the second positive (SPS) and first negative (FNS) systems of molecular nitrogen. The theory of the method combines a spectroscopic means for the calculation of temporal waveforms of the nitrogen absolute SPS and FNS (0,0)-band emission and a self-consistent semi-analytical parametric axially symmetric 1.5D model of the filamentary streamer head. With a procedure fitting the directly computed output voltage waveforms to the experimental ones obtained in part I, the peak values of the electric field and the electron number density within the streamer head at mid-gap distances have been found to be 430-500 Td and (2-3)×10¹⁴ cm^-3, respectively. And the corresponding absolute electric field is thus 70-80 kV cm^-1 at the initial gas temperature within the repetitive streamer region of 450 K.