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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2009
We have studied experimentally the relation between the preionization of a plasma micro-channel in Argon at atmospheric pressure and the dynamics of the discharge initiated by preionization. Preionization is obtained in two different ways: (a) injecting the soft X rays produced by a 3 J, 3 ns YAG laser focused on a copper target through a pinhole (b) direct focusing of a 4ω laser (0·26 μm) along the Argon column. Both experiments and simple numerical models are presented in this paper.