Presented study deals with bismuth glow discharge measured by optical spectroscopy methods. The medium was prepared by sputtering of bismuth in auxiliary argon discharge.
It has been found that when bismuth is used as a cathode, it is melted and evaporated due to an enhanced temperature of a cathode system. This circumstance contributes to significantly higher amount of bismuth vapors in the discharge.
Discharge-assisted evaporating of bismuth arranged this way could be used for future measurements of radiative transitions between high-l orbital states carried out by FTIR (Time-resolved Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) spectrometer.