Diagnostics of dynamic behaviors of excited atoms in microplasmas for plasma display panels

Summary form only given, as follows. We developed a microscopic laser-absorption method for the absolute measurement of excited Xe(1S/sub 4/, 1s/sub 5/) atoms, which lead to VUV emissions for the excitation of RGB phosphors, with a spatial and temporal resolution of 20 /spl mu/m and 5 ns, respectively. For the measurement of higher lying excited Xe(2p) atoms and Ne(2p) atoms, the corresponding near IR and visible emissions were observed by a gated CCD camera equipped with appropriate optical band pass filters. For the simultaneous front and side view observations, we constructed a special panel, which had a realistic AC-type cell structure and sizes.