Experimental study of Balmer α line broadening of argon-hydrogen discharge plasmas

The excessive Balmer α line broadening was observed under the conditions of the hollow cathode discharge of mixed gas of argon-hydrogen, whereas under the same conditions, the abnormal Balmer α line broadening was not found from the hydrogen plasma or the plasma of the mixture of hydrogen with other gas. This showed that in a particular state of argon-hydrogen plasma some chemical reaction occurred, and released a lot of energy, so that the hydrogen atom temperature highly increased to generate the excessive line broadening. The theory of fractional hydrogen to explain this phenomenon was analyzed in this paper by the experimental results. The analysis showed that this theory is reasonable.